As a minority, you tend to look everywhere to see yourself represented. Whether it be in movies, books, TV shows, music, or life, there’s something comforting in knowing that you can see parts of yourself in others. It does get discouraging though, when all the people you look at are dying or unhappy. This is the struggle that queer girls and women face every time that we try to find a character that we can see ourselves in. Finding LGBTQ+ characters in today’s media is hard enough–in their most recent report on TV, GLAAD has reported that LGBTQ+ characters make up only 4.8% of the characters on broadcast TV–but finding ones that stay alive is becoming close to impossible.

Killing queer women has become so common that it has its own trope: Bury Your Gays. The trope Bury Your Gays goes back centuries, and is unfortunately still in full use today. TV Tropes (tvtropes.org) describes the trope as one where “gay characters just aren’t allowed happy endings.” While it makes sense that in older works this might have been more prevalent–especially with lesbian pulp fiction where one author was told that the gay characters were not allowed happy endings–it seems like there is no need for it in 2016. Yet, turn on a TV and you will see lesbians dying left and right. When we look at our favorite queer women characters, they’re either getting shot by a stray bullet (Lexa, The 100), getting killed by guards (Poussey Washington, Orange is the New Black) or dying in car explosions (Nora and Mary Louise, The Vampire Diaries). And these deaths are just within the last year. It’s obvious that some queer characters will die, but the rate at which writers have been killing them off compared to straight characters is appalling. From the 1970s until now, there have been 162 deaths of queer female characters on TV, out of around 380 queer female characters altogether. That’s approximately 42%.

Many say that these characters were killed off for so-calledshock value, but the thing is, it’s not so shocking anymore. It’s normal. It’s common practice. A shocking thing would be to have a queer female character be alive, happy, and in a healthy relationship, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in TV at all. According to an article in Autostraddle, which studied queer women in fiction, 35% of shows have dead lesbian/bi female characters, and 84% of shows don’t give lesbian/bi female characters happy endings. We constantly see ourselves dying, being written off, or being heartbroken. While TV networks might pat themselves on the back for being progressive enough to include queer characters, all that progressiveness goes out the window when the writers and showrunners decide that they’ve had enough. It’s not progressive to show a lesbian character, hype her, bring in a huge LGBTQ+ audience, and then simply kill her off. It’s not progressive when we are only included to be killed. Some might say that at least we’re getting representation, but this representation does not befit us. It is time wewere given hope.

When first accepting that they are queer, a lot of queer youth will look to anything to see themselves represented, and it’s disheartening to know that queer youth will see their representations die. We see too much of white, cisgender, and straight characters on TV, when what we need to see are characters of color, transgender and nonbinary characters, and queer characters. It just might help those struggling to come to terms with their sexuality. As Larry Wilmore said on the Nightly Show after the Orlando shooting, “unlike other minority groups in America, LGBT people aren’t born into a home or a family that shares their minority experience.” A majority of LGBTQ+ people can’t simply turn to their family for support, so they turn to fictional characters, but it’s a real kick in the face when we see all of these characters become neglected.

The message that TV show runners are giving queer women who are desperate to see themselves represented is that we can be gay in the sense of being queer but we cannot be gay in the sense of being happy.

Diana Holiner is 20 years old and is part of the Dynamy Internship Year program. She is originally from Dover, Massachusetts and is now living in Worcester. She interns at Worcester Magazine and the Worcester Journal. In her free time she enjoys reading, writing, singing, and eating ice cream.

Melissa Mason is an English major with a focus in Creative Writing and an Art minor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She hopes to be anovelist one day, though she also enjoys writing short stories and poetry.

On the first night you brushed your teeth huddled around the blue pila, a large square concrete sink with three chambers. You were a gringo family honoring your oral hygiene despite the absence of running water. The water stored in the central chamber of the pila passed your visual cleanliness test, with the moonlight glancing off its ripples, but you knew that bacterial microbes lurked. No splashing of toothbrushes or cupping your hands to take a swig.

Instead, you shared a few drops of bottled Evian bought at the Atlanta airport by your teenage daughter. When the Evian ran out, your husband used Coca Cola. You were 4,000 miles from home and about to teach English in Guatemala.

As your family brushed you contemplated the pila. The four of you could have climbed into the central storage chamber, becoming immersed to your armpits.

***

Running water was unpredictable in the central highlands where the indigenous Maya live. When the water ran, it was wisely stored in advance of tomorrow’s trickle. The pila was imported by the Spanish who placed the first fountains in a central spot in every town square. As the population grew the people placed private pila in the courtyards of their homes. At that time they had agua pura. Except for centuries of greed, wars, genocide and land grabbing, the water that night in your pila would have had a fighting chance of purity. Nothing in the natural world could have out-competed man at creating such a colossal catastrophe.

***

As you gazed at the southern constellations you missed your usual line-up of Big Dipper, Little Dipper and Orion’s Belt. But you reassured yourself that you could do this homestay with an indigenous family for just two weeks.

You were already an expert at crapping in the outdoors, if need be, and had brought a supply oftoilet paper in a giant red suitcase. You had backpacked in Colorado, lived in a Spanishcave, hitchhiked through North Africa, bicycled in China and slept on a haystack inIreland. You had the resume to qualify and this wouldn’t be insurmountable.

But it would take you days before you noticed the five-gallon blue bottle of agua pura the family stored in full sight in the kitchen. When you noticed youhad to laugh, a small rueful laugh at your own blindness. It was a replica of the BelmontSprings bottle from home and yet you had missed it in your summation of objects in thekitchen.

Like a coloring book that asks the child to find everything mismatching in the picture, the sheer number of surprises was mind-spinning. No gas, propane or electric stove, an unplugged empty refrigerator, no spigot of running water and the buzzing cluster of flies congregated around the bowl of breads meant for your breakfast. A glance to the ceiling revealed open electrical wires. This was a kitchen called upon to feed four families, and now yours, three meals a day.

***

You were sad when you first saw your room, smelling of old tortillas and beans. Like a jail cell, no window or closet. No fitted sheets on the bed, no pillows, no bedspread. You wanted to reach your white hand back through time just six hours, before your luggage was packed in the trunk of the Lexus, and open your well-organized linen closet smelling of Tide and grab a fitted set.

In the WC you faced a truth of your visit: Your hosts had never been to a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and why should they need to visit? A single industrial sized nail made a reasonable, though minimalist, toilet roll holder.

***

You quickly got yourself in hand and began to adapt. You learned to bunch up a blanket andspread a towel to simulate a pillow. In the mornings, you drank lukewarm apple tea andate small round sweet breads selected from the bowl on the table. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, from giant boxes with the signature red rooster, were consumed with warm powdered milk. Over time, the small green squash, called quiskill, and a chicken bone in your soupbecame a treat.

You delighted in the bustling streets brimming with smiling people. You liked the dusty switchbacks crisscrossing the green hills between pińon pine, avocado and cedar. You laughed at misshapen trees on every hilltop that reminded you of Dr. Seuss. The hills were spotted with smoke clouds rising from open fires and stoves that reminded you ofLittle House on the Prairie, but soon you admitted this was another romantic fantasy. Thecardboard shacks with aluminum roofs were nothing like log cabins, and the open fires inthe living rooms created respiratory illnesses, a leading cause of infections in children anddeath in the elderly.

You looked into the eyes of the passing women, carrying lumpy mystery bundles on their heads
, and said buenos dias every morning and buenas tardes every afternoon, starting at one minute past noon.

At your lodging you heard 13 people all live underneath one roof without shouting. You saw uncles and aunts hug nieces and nephews, giving kisses just as loving as those given by the mamas and papas. You witnessed joyful reunions between adult siblings every Friday night,following five days of separation because work was in the capital, hours away. You saw the children play in the courtyard, digging with a spoon or flipping aplastic object. Once the littlest girl, just two, pulled down her panties to wee in the dirt. Her five year-old cousin stopped mid-game and, with a gentleman’s flourish, helped her yank her panties up before resuming their play. You witnessed a Saturday morning fiesta-day when 18 women, babies and childrencrowded into the kitchen and women patted out tortillas while others nursed babies on the floor telling jokes and gossiping.

***

On your return, while laying over in Atlanta, you used the bathroom just to celebrate the toilet paper flushing away. No longer would you have to store it in the little basket with theswinging lid.You ordered a green salad to extol the return of vegetables to your diet. You sat near a white family with three kids, all wearing baseball caps and trendy t-shirts. “Sit there and don’t move,” said the man, as he pulled too hard on the boy’s chair. The boy cried through his meal while no one offered consolation. Like leaving a trance you never knew you had entered, you missed the quietmurmurs redirecting restless children at the dinner table.

Athome, you were both relieved and distressed. You had to reconcile a legacy of emotions. You were embarrassed by how tough you found the physical challenges and inconveniences. You were sad that your new friends might never have a vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, hot showers, clothes washer and dryer, coffee pot and a stockpile of food in a working refrigerator, common conveniences in your country. You were guilty of impatience with delayed service in foreign restaurants. You shamed yourself for judgments of the poor. You assigned goodness to the poor everywhere—the ‘halo effect”–creating a kind of noble savage scenario.You knew your lifestyle was thievery, stealing more than your share of worldwide resources, despite your own efforts at recycling and driving a low emissions vehicle.

***

You were happy to reunite with your kitchen with its potable, fluoridated and chlorinated water that flowed any time of day or night, and not just on certain lucky mornings. You filled a glass and drank the cool clean water that tasted like privilege.

Elizabeth Rose is a non-fiction writer based in Massachusetts. She has published in the Boston Globe Magazine, the Newburyport Daily News, Newburyport Magazine, and the Northshore Jewish Journal. She is an MFA candidate in Lesley University’s Creative Non-fiction program. This article is the preface of her book detailing her experiences as a woman of privilege working in Guatemala.

Kanani Foster

There is an airy humdrum whirring in the hospital room; wires hang and twist from bed to monitor and wall in a ceremonious blink of intermittent lights. Unlike the preconceived image of an omniscient heart monitor counting the moments between life and death, all is quiet.

My grandmother is curling in on herself slowly with each passing hour. Her heavy folded lids twitch while her soft dark hands paw at her face, and I am reminded of a fetus moments before entering the world, unaware of its surroundings and even its own self. She doesnât hear my teary hiccups.

When I entered the room I called her name, apprehensive of even touching her. Last night, before the ambulances came, she did not recognize my mother, her own child. She screamed and pushed my mom away, frantic in the moment of not knowing, and then somewhere between her old couch to this hospital gurney she no longer responded to us. I am terrified of putting my hand on her shoulder, but I finally do. There is nothing here.

Sitting on the chair in the corner, I am acutely aware that this will be my final moment with my grandmother.

The only other death that had touched my sheltered life was a childhood friend. I could not remember the last time we spoke, but I did remember the news breaking over the school that day. That moment was only a point in my life, a marker to pinpoint how our paths were not explicitly joined, and neither her life nor death affected me directly. It was simply a moment that made me sad, because I was acutely aware that I would not ever see her again.

This is different; I am watching a gentle death. It is astounding in the artistry and skill that is slowly taking place before me as organs find rest, the blood begins to slow, and breaths are pulled farther apart. I am sad that I am watching my flesh and blood wither. I am sad that I will never speak to her again. I am sad that I will not miss her as much as I should.

This death fills me with remorse to the opportunities I missed.

The knowledge and history that is gone.

The relationship I could have formed.

***

Itâs hard to look at the withered man beside me. He is stripped of any bit of pride, vanity, and perhaps even his sanity at this point. My grandmotherâs mouth hangs open like an old Japanese ghoul and I try to distract myself with the thought that, if spirits exist, hers had floated from her mouth like a soft exhaling of smoke. I suddenly have the urge to open a window to let her free.

âWake up, Ma, wake up.âHe is gently shaking her. I coax him into the chair next to the bed that he has already occupied for the past week, waiting. The wait is up and I am almost glad to feel the stress bleach itself from the room with a new shade of grief.

Over the past months we have watched my grandfather falter in speech, physical ability, and memory, yet in this moment he is more aware than I have seen him a year. He may not understand the complex renal system failure that claimed her, out but he feels the loss. He felt it when the realization dawned on him that these were her last days.

***

I guess itâs selfish, but I havenât visited my grandfather in two weeks now. I canât bring myself to unless my mom pushes me to the small cabin across the way, muggy, full of his resounding grief. He has a compulsive need to fix the blinds that are not broken, and when he does my mom will whisper that the dementia is a blessing. I still canât look at it that way.

My grandfather flutters between a drugged oblivion of minute details and past lifetimes to stuttered confusion at the here and now. Some visits he ignores me, staring blankly at another old Western film on AMC that he has surely seen within the past week; other times he paws at his leathered hands, stuttering in his excitement for this meager 30 minutes of company.

Like most people, I donât stay very long.

He doesnât get many calls and obsesses over the two times a week my mom takes him out grocery shopping, counting the days till he gets to go out again and do something. Busy work, itâs what keeps him going these days.

The cabin is unbearably humid as he always liked it, pretending he was back home in Hawaii or Florida, and sweat rolls down my neck as I try to talk to him. It has only been a few hours since our listless drive home from the hospital, yet my grandpa is completely focused on the shades covering the sliding door. At least he has that damned dog, Iâm grateful for it even as it yaps and nips at my heels. Heâd be lost without it.

The sliding door shade glides on a track that his stick is repeatedly poking and prodding,

âItâs stuck.

Itâs stuck.

Itâs stuck.â

Itâs not. He is relentless though and I try to think of something that might bring him to me and away from desperate thoughts of fixing something thatâs not broken.

I ask, âWhatâs that tattoo of?âthe ink on his body is faded blue on a canvas that is soft and crinkles like tissue paper. This tattoo seems to be a knife with what might be a hand holding it.

âI was stupid. This was my- my first tattoo.â

The tattoo was ugly. Badly drawn with ink that faded quickly; he might as well have gotten it in prison with a safety pin. I point out another, one that his shirtsleeve covers. This tattoo is a piece of history; a black skull with air force wings and a banner overhead reading âBillyâ.

âI designed this. We, we all have it.â

âWho?â

â
Sixteen of us. We were in the same–âHe stutters, trying to remember.

âGroup? Platoon? Squad?â

âYeahâ

I point out another that his shaking fingers begin to sweep, this one being a red rose. Itâs a cover-up job–lying underneath it, coiled in its petals is his ex-wifeâs name that my mother has forgotten and he refuses to utter. I wonder how Grandma felt about it. Was it something they bickered over? Or something that was never spoken of? Another is the word Hawaii on his forearm, his social security number on his left shoulder, even his name is splayed across his arm. As we point and unveil new sketches of his own history I feel him begin to let go of his grief and reminisce on each moment in time he has saved on his body; each mistake, each victory and each love.

***

Grieving is an art t unique to each person. My grandpa burned all of her clothes three days after she died, sprinkling the lawn with the ashes. My mom had her actual ashes sent directly to her brother in Hawaii–âItâs what she wouldâve wantedâ—but I know that holding my grandma in that state wouldâve been too much for her. She sat by my grandmotherâs side till her chest finally caved in, refusing to rise again, and thatâs closure enough for most.

I cried like everyone else but somehow still managed to crack a joke sitting in front of my grandmaâs body; her mouth unhinged and eyes shut, earning me a sharp look from my mom till she began to laugh and cry once again. It was sad but my life continued on after we left the hospital, leaving me to wonder at my grieving.

I miss her. I really do.

I miss the little things though the most; her genuine interest in my life, her sticky rice that seemed stickier than most sticky rice, her long-winded stories that never concluded.

One day, at the Asian Art Museum, seeing the walls hung with ornate silk kimonos decorated with golden threads spun into peonies and koi, another memory returned–my grandmother clambering down from the upstairs of her cabin holding a parcel. Inside were her own kimonos from Japan, an airy blue with white flowers and a heavier white with gold flowers coating the bottom trim. There was no time or reason I would wear them, but I held them close.

Standing in the museum I foraged my mind for the kimonosâ whereabouts; my parentsâhouse in the closet, under my own bed, in storage? I didnât know. It rattled me and I felt like a foreigner to this heritage and culture. I felt as silly as the white girls dressed in kimonos and sloppy geisha makeup waiting for the museumâs Japanese fashion show. I had lost my grandmother and a piece of my heritage.

My great-grandfather came to America on a tiny boat from Japan, ready to pick pineapple on the islands of Hawaii to save money and become someone. I remembered all this but I forgot his name, he would always just be someone now.

Later I call my mom asking if she remembers esnât. Mizaki? Maybe Matsu? She has to think on that. There is no use in asking my grandfather; his speech is falling away along with the ability to even recall his last meal.

I don’t remember the night my big sister went crazy, but I’ve been told about it. Mama said that Sissy didn’t have all the screws tightened in her head, and that’s why she attacked me. The only thing I can still recall is someone yanking all the hair out of my head and pinning my ankles to the ground. Oh, and the screaming. I still don’t know if I was screaming or if Sissy was screaming or if Mama and Baba were screaming, but I know it was loud and made me cry.

Sissy wasn’t like that all the time, though. She had good days. Like when we stood in the creek behind the back shed and squealed with laughter as tiny fish slithered between our toes. Or how we’d lie in bed at night and she would sing those folk songs that I loved so much. I wish those moments lasted forever.

She had bad days too. Like when Mama told us to set the table for dinner and she smashed all the plates. Or the times I woke up in the middle of the night to her scratching my arms and legs until I bled. She told me that her friends told her to do it. I never saw Sissy with friends. I’m pretty sure she has friends tonly she can’t see.

I’ve been in the hospital since the attack. Mama doesn’t let Sissy visit, but I know Sissy didn’t mean to hurt me, so I’m not mad at her. Sometimes she just can’t control herself. I hope my screws never come loose.

* * *

Years ago, when I was seven and Sissy was eleven, we were playing in the meadow behind the woods that led away from our house. The tall grass tickled our bare legs as we danced. Sissy’s two long braids hung down her back and glimmered in the setting sun. Mama would be getting things ready for dinner soon and probably was waiting for us to set the table.

“We’re going to play a game.”

“Oh but Sissy it’s getting late, and Mama is going to worry.”

“Ready or not, here you come.”

“We really should get back.”

“Ready or not, here you come, play with us, let’s have some fun.”

I hated when we played that game. Sissy would run into the woods and hide while I would lie in the meadow with my eyes closed and arms outstretched.

“One, two three…”

The air was getting colder and the sun began to dip beneath the hill.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three…”

Mama would be worrying.

“Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety…”

Sometimes I’d wonder what would happen if I just left Sissy in those woods. Maybe if she lived in those woods instead of in our house she wouldn’t make Baba cry or give me scratches that she told me to keep secret from Mama and maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about falling asleep before her. But I went to find her anyways. I always did.

As the tall grass thinned and the woods began, I scanned the tree line for her. I looked at the tops of the trees first because sometimes she likes to hang from the highest branches. She would swing in circles way up high and I’d be on the ground praying that those branches wouldn’t snap. My eyes shifted to the ground. It was getting dark.

I wanted to be brave so I sang every word loudly because it made Sissy happy when I did, but the tune sent a tingle down my spine. I took slow steps and purposely snapped twigs and crunched leaves to make my presence known. My words rang through the forest and seemed to hang in the air. I sang and sang but heard nothing except the applause from the whistling leaves of the trees. She was nowhere to be seen.

“Olly Olly Oxen free. Sissy, please come out, you’re scaring me.”

I raced wildly through the woods. Long shadows melted into the ground and the sounds of creatures hummed from the darkness. The first few beams of the moon shone through the trees.

“Sissy! Please, I don’t want to play anymore!”

I heard a snap of branches behind me and whipped around.

“We have something to show you, I really hope you like it,” she said, eyes twinkling.

She skipped down the path, her braids bouncing. Her steps were light and airy as she seemed to dance around every rock and trunk and branch, while I trudged behind and struggled to follow. She stopped abruptly when we reached a break in the path. Legs rooted to the ground, she swayed in her spot for a few moments like she had done before.

She stopped and pointed at the ground. Five bloody rabbits were laid in a neat row. Their eyes had been gouged out.

“Do you like it?”

“Sissy this is not nice. We need to go home. This is scaring me.” But that’s when her eyes narrowed and her lip quivered and her cheeks flushed. I reached out a shaking hand to comfort her with, but she slapped it away and growled.

Sissy came home late. I was already in bed.

“I’m so glad we could play today,” she said. “We had so much fun, didn’t we? Let’s do it again, let’s do it again soon.

She rummaged around the room for a few moments, climbed into her bed, and began breathing heavily as her special Sand Man pills put her to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning I heard Sissy singing in the backyard. I sat up, and let out a scream as I saw five dead rabbits on the foot of my bed.

* * *

I’m still not sure why I can’t go home from the hospital and see Sissy. I miss standing in the creek with her looking at fish and I miss her folk songs. One time I asked one doctor when Sissy was going to visit, but he didn’t answer. He just gave me another shot and I got really sleepy.

Yesterday I heard the doctor talking with Mama and Baba. They talked about upping my medication, so I think that means I’m going to be sleeping even more now. I was hoping they’d mention something about taking off these things around my wrists that are binding me to the bed, but they didn’t say anything about it. Hopefully I’ll be able to go home soon.

* * *

Mama and Baba have stopped visiting. I think they’re scared of me. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but it’s okay because I have friends to keep me company now. The doctor is really interested in my friends and asks about them all the time, but they don’t li
ke to talk when he’s there.

When the doctor isn’t asking about my friends, he’s asking me about Sissy. He keeps asking me if I remember killing her, why I killed her. Whenever he asks me this I just shake. I can only shake.

My friends tell me it’s okay I killed Sissy the night she tried to attack me. It’s okay, they whisper, because she killed those rabbits and she scratched my arms and legs and she made Mama and Baba cry and she scared me. She had it coming. Sometimes I can’t stop crying though, because I don’t remember anything about that night besides the yanking of hair and the screaming. But my friends always remind me that it’s okay. They tell me that she couldn’t control herself and I was sick of being sisters with someone who had loose screws. But at night when my friends get quiet and I get lonely, I miss talking to Sissy.

Olly olly oxen free, please come back.

Rachel Santarsiero is a at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, studying Civil Engineering and Professional Writing, and International Studies. She loves to combine the technical world with the humanities. She is the Executive Director of the non-profit Cross-Cultural Competence and is working toward a career in writing.

Love, Desire and Death – By Georges Barbier / Bridgeman Art Library / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

The first time I saw him after the breakup was at that girl’s wake.

You remember her, right? That pretty, curvy brunette that sat behind us in Composition? She wore those too-short shorts, even when it was cold out and snapped her gum obnoxiously before she spoke. Her heavily outlined eyes narrowed to slits during class discussions as she would feverishly concoct counterarguments to the class’s decided opinion. God, how that pissed me off. Such an attention hog. Well, apparently last Monday she was doing 102 down Woodhaven Ave and crashed into a telephone pole. I still can’t remember if she made prom queen or runner-up last year though.

Just the other week in class we were discussing The Tempest and whether or not Prospero had ultimately been the true king of the island. He raised his hand confidently while I sat there memorizing the shape of his upturned chin and his tousled hair.

“It’s evident Prospero is the victim of the play, and is merely trying to re-establish justice on the island. He single-handedly rights all the wrongs of the island and therefore is the true and rightful king.”

He was always coming up with stuff like this in class, and I was admittedly mesmerized, entranced. The class, too, seemed to be under his spell as each student nodded in agreement. Then snap, snap, snap from the back of the room. Our heads twisted around only to lay eyes on her crossed arms, cocked head, and overworked jaw.

“You’re kidding me, right? I mean, no offense, but you must be joking.” She looked around for support, but the class did nothing but stare back in disbelief. She, however, continued without hesitation. “Well, to be honest, everything you’re saying is pretty pretentious. It sounds like you took that right from Sparknotes.”

Nobody spoke. I looked to him for some sort of retort, an argument, anything at all, but he gave nothing. A vein swelled in his forehead and his cheeks flushed.

Snap, snap, snap.

“Personally, I think Caliban’s the real king.” I over-exaggerated an eyeroll in hopes he would see it, but he just stared straight back at her, blood obviously boiling despite his efforts to keep composure. “I mean, who the fuck—oh, sorry Mr. Hart—does Prospero think he is? Caliban was there first and his mom ruled the island way before Prospero even got there. You’re kind of just being an asshole if you think Prospero is the real king.”

And that was Vanessa Cleaver. She possessed the rare combination of being both popular and obscure, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys. She and I moved in different circles throughout high school, but I couldn’t help feeling quietly envious of her. Envious of this defiant, Caliban-supporting, gum-chewing girl who died doing 102 down Woodhaven Ave.

I was still waiting in line when I saw him up ahead of me. Saw him and felt my lungs collapse. Saw him in that black button-down I got him when we went to Cape Cod and those khakis his mom was always telling you to throw away. Saw him and felt my heart leap in a way that it shouldn’t at a wake. Our eyes connected, and I felt an electric current run through my body. Before I knew what I was doing I was walking out of line and walking right up to him. He looked at me like I had food in my teeth or something and couldn’t understand why I was cutting all these people that were waiting to kneel by this dead girl’s closed casket. I still couldn’t tell you why I walked up to him that day, but my feet started moving and I wasn’t about to stop them. I stood in front of him, awestruck.

“Hey.” Really, that’s the best I could manage?

“Um, hi. H-how are you?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good, that’s good to hear.”

“How about you, how have you been?”

“I’m all right, this is…this is all just so weird, you know? I was just talking to Vanessa the other day in class, and now…”

Wow, really? There I was just trying to ask him how he was doing after the breakup and all he wanted to do was talk about Vanessa.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” I repeated mechanically.

“I mean ,I just can’t believe it, I’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess. How are we though?”

I blurted it out before I could stop myself.

“Are things okay between us? I’m just not sure if we should talk about things now that we’ve had a little time to—”

“Are you serious?” He took a step back. “Vanessa’s dead. She’s dead, and our breakup is what you’re worried about right now? That’s pretty fucked up, even for you.”

I stood there, dumbstruck, unable to respond. I stared back at him, searching for something to say, anything, but I was frozen. When I remembered how to move my body, I slowly turned without another word and returned to my place in line.

I stood in that line for an eternity before I reached her. My soles were sore in my too-small heels and my dress felt awkward around my shoulders, like a hug from an elderly relative I didn’t want.

I couldn’t believe him. Why didn’t he care about me? How could he be this cold, this selfish? I made a mental note to try to talk to him again at the funeral. That’s three days from now. Maybe he’d be more receptive then.

When it was finally my turn to kneel, I stayed there for what I felt was an appropriate amount of time. And as I stared at her closed casket, I was half expecting her to be in there grinning and snapping her gum in her too-short shorts, flipping carelessly through the pages of The Tempest.

I stand on the dirt of a soccer field and watch the world become more still with each gust of wind. It whisks away the heat of my body and seemingly my color–makes me ashen, much like everything else in this dead field. Neither grass nor trees are spared, their glorious bright green and warm brown simply gone.

I’m always early for practice. Few people are here, including my coach. Usually more come half way through, but I figure today is too cold for most of them.

The year began with a bright fervor, teammates coming in an hour early to get into gear. When practice began each one of them would skip ahead the line, doing exercises again and again, with little regard to the ones behind them; They only cared about becoming better.. The sun was bright—too bright, obnoxiously so, sticking its rays like needles into our eyes, adding a layer of tan to the rainbow of skin colors on our team. That was fine. Even when the cruel field threatened them with its perilous bumps and holes, changing the trajectory of the ball, and sometimes ankles, that was fine, too. They would still push themselves to the very limit—every coach’s dream team.

A few weeks later, though, after a couple of games, their ardor would dwindle, like the passing of fall into winter. Not a rush, but a gradual process, one our coach did not notice but everyone else did. By the time it was the last quarter of our season, only half of the team would regularly show up.

Which was nothing knew. They were good, and this is how winners end up–arrogant, apathetic, foolish, It didn’t both me, even seeing my teammates laze away the precious talent I would give an arm and a leg for. OK, maybe there was a bit of hate.

I always came back, whether I wanted to or not. I tried to give up, I really did, but it wasn’t my choice anymore. My mind is fully awake only when the ball is under my feet.

I stare at the scans on my knees, the bruisers of my feet, at the scrapes on my thighs. I listen to my ankle’s popping noise when I walk downstairs. Yet my body would not listen. It had to come, a to practice.

So here I am again, still standing in the cold, still incapable of leaving when all others do.

Much like the critically acclaimed Gilmore Girls, Grace and Frankie fits its prospective audience perfectly, keeping a slow but steady plot, filled with laughs and minor drama–perfect series to binge watch when you’re sick or just need a day to relax. Directed by Betty Thomas and created by Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris in 2015, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin star as women who begin to live together and become unlikely friends after their husbands, played by Sam Waterston and Martin Sheen, come out as lovers. Lily Tomlin was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015 and 2016 for this role.

It all starts with a nice dinner together, in public, the perfect place to make a spectacle of yourselves while you wives throw food at you and yell after you tell them about your 20 year affair with each other. Obviously that wasn’t how Robert and Sol expected it to go, but Grace and Frankie have never been those to do the expected. That’s part of what makes their living arrangements, sharing their beach house, so odd. They’ve always been those ladies who gossip behind each other’s backs to their mutual friend Babe and smile to each other’s faces. But now, being put in the same position, they realize that no one else can truly understand the feeling that their entire marriage and life was a lie.

We also see the development of Robert and Sol’s relationship before and after their marriages, finding out the secrets that they hid while together in secret.

Not unexpectedly, the couples’ children also have a hard time adjusting, not knowing which side to stand on.

The overall cinematography is pretty good. It’s shown from far away, much like the cameras on a sitcom, so that one can almost observe what’s going on. There are no close ups really. This gives a stage-like effect that really adds to the overall show, not trying to draw viewers into the show but presenting them with the story.

The sets are present character and quirks of the characters. Frankie has her own meditation nook at the beach house, with a hanging woven chair and hippie-patterned pillows on the floor. Grace and Robert had a pristine house with nothing out of place, looking like r a picture from Good Housekeeping.

Throughout the series, the plot stands not only as a commentary on feminism and family values, but also on aging and how one’s life changes as we age. We experience what it’s like to be a female CEO of a cosmetics company, an elderly gay couple, a different race than your parents, and how the people in your life changes who you are. It’s definitely worth a watch.

Lillian Cohen currently attends Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts and is an active member and Chapter Board member of the United Synagogue Youth organization. She enjoys writing and is an intern at both the Worcester Journal and Worcester Magazine.

After a two-year hiatus, platinum-award winning artist J. Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only Only transitions from his predictable discussions of fame and fortune to bringing his listeners into the dark and moody realism of social problems, nuanced with a sense of hope and change. He describes his new role as a husband and father and contrasts that with the life of a fictional African American man who is forced to balance a life of crime and parenthood, ultimately forcing him to leave his family.

Cole has eschewed the noise of mainstream hip hop, producing a melancholic sound with somber and organic instrumentation. The project begins with the song “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. A depressing trumpet is played in the background and bells are tenaciously shook as Cole sings “I see the rain pourin’ down…”The sorrowful mood is further conveyed in songs such as “Ville Mentality” and “4 Your Eyez Only”.

He introduces listeners to his wife and newborn daughter in the songs, “She’s Mine, Pt. 1,” “Foldin Clothes,” and “She’s Mine, Pt. 2.” After a long self-exile from social media and hip hop music, he sheds some insight on what kept him occupied. In “She’s Mine, Pt. 1”, Cole eulogizes his fiancee, and ultimately conveys what she means to him. The song is reminiscent of his much older love songs, such as “Dreams.” But orchestrally, it is very somber and deviates from the traditional hip hop sound, suggesting he has found new and authentic love. He further conveys his love for his fiancée in the song “Foldin’ Clothes,” in which he raps about the smaller things in life, such as folding clothes. In “She’s Mine, Pt. 2,” Cole sings of his new role as a father, and how precious his daughter is to him, questioning whether he is “worthy of this gift”.

Cole also illustrates the perspective of, presumptively, his fictional African American friend struggling with poverty, creating a harsh and callous mentality. This serves the purpose for his song, “Immortal,” which reverts to Cole’s usage of aggressive flow and rhymes, this time over an eerie beat, creating vivid imagery of crime, death, and drugs. He then proceeds to illustrate the callous mentality that develops as a result of such social pressures by affirming that “real” men do not break down or die from them, hence the title “Immortal.” In the outro of the song, Cole makes an insightful point from his own perspective. He remarks how so many are influenced to think that the only way to be successful is to play in the NBA, become a rapper, or deal drugs, thus restricting them from reaching their full potential. However, in his song, “Changes”, Cole provides a sense of hope and maturation for these problems.

The final song is “4 Your Eyez Only,” an emotional track with a duration of 8 minutes in which Cole reveals the purpose of the entire album. In the previous song, “Changes,” Cole reveals the name of his fictional African American friend, James Mcmillan Jr. In the majority of “4 Your Eyez Only”, Cole raps from the perspective of James, who is leaving an important message behind for his young daughter. In a pessimistic tone, he expresses how he “can’t visualize [himself] as nothing but a criminal,” and voices his premonition on how his harsh lifestyle with crime and drugs will result in his death. He also mentions how the cops have a presence in his neighborhood, which may be referencing police brutality in America. Through this verse, J. Cole reveals the true reality behind a life associated with crime, and how these lifestyles can emotionally affect men, regardless of how “real” or “immortal” they might seem. The last verse is told from Cole’s perspective, and he concludes that the album is a message left behind from James to his daughter. He finishes 4 Your Eyez Only by remarking that his father was a “real” man, not because he was involved with drugs and crime, but because of his passionate love for his daughter.

There are a few problems. The vague transitions between his perspective and James’ perspective is confusing. Throughout the album, Cole raps from James’ perspective, only to rap from his own a few lines later. His transitions are often abrupt, and it’s also difficult to distinguish them, considering both of them often talk about their daughters. This obfuscates the overall purpose and message Cole is trying to convey. Also, explicitly revealing the entire purpose of the album in an eight-minute song prevents his listeners from recognizing for themselves the album’s subtleties. Lastly, 4 Your Eyez Only is comprised of only ten songs. This may leave some fans unsatisfied, considering Cole was inactive for 2 years.

And yet, the album as a whole provides a comprehensible picture of social problems facing African Americans while revealing the positive changes in the singer’s life. Also, he finally deviates from the traditional hip-hop sound, which may please the fans who are eager for change. 4 Your Eyez Only proves itself to be a worthy album.

Puberty 2 is the latest album from Mitski. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Though just shy of 26 years old, Mitski is already an artist who effortlessly manages to blur the line between force and fragility. Here is an extensive release of existential and outsider themes that evoke both utter despair and raw power, along with inevitable feelings of growth, command, and maturity. Mitski already realizes and fluently expresses emotional knowledge through her lyrics, which varyingly speak directly to the girl on a drunk walk home alone, the girl listening to records on her bedroom floor after a bad breakup, and the girl who is just trying to be the best she can be and still feels inadequate. Speaking to the anxieties, both modern and timeless, of the teen and young-twenties girl, Mitski unwaveringly roots for the underdog; pretty much any situation you can imagine feeling like you are definitely gunna die, Mitski has probably already sung about it.

I pulled up her recent album Puberty 2 released June 17th) on Spotify as I rode home from a friend’s apartment around midnight. I was a couple of songs in when I reached my own dimly lit apartment, but decided to ride around a little more to complete the album (as if I hadn’t already heard it a million times). Puberty 2 is the type of album where you really just have to listen to it all the way through,maybe two—or three—or twelve times in one sitting.

The first song I heard that got me hooked on this wonderful Brooklyn-based artist was “First Love/Late Spring,” which I have tried and failed countless times to learn on guitar. This was from her previous album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek (2014). It was Tuesday afternoon in October of last year; I was lying on my bed after a long day of classes, procrastinating making my way up the hill to the library to write my capstone papers. The lyrics were so striking and hit me so hard, I had to immediately listen to it three more times.

In the words of Lester Bangs, “music—you know, true music, not just rock’ n’ roll—chooses you.” Mitski’s is the kind of music that makes these words ring true for me. I knew of a few friends who mentioned Bury Me at Makeout Creek in the past, but it wasn’t until that day when I stumbled upon this dark and emotional album that I finally got what they were all talking about. And I think there’s something to be said for Bangs’ statement—music is this all-encompassing powerful shit that can just encapsulate your entire soul whether you’re at an open mic night, a stadium concert, or alone, lying on your bed listening to your third generation green iPod Nano (do not judge me). No matter the setting, Mitski’s songs are just this kind of all-encompassing and captivating music—the kind that seems to choose you.

Mitski does not hold hesitate to immerse herself in her own emotions and sadness, which in itself is remarkable in a time when female artists are often expected to show indifference or relentless power towards relationships—and yet, Mitski still manages to make music that is undoubtedly empowering. Anyone (but actually probably just millennials) can relate to her honest and overtly relatable lyrics. (Check out “Class of 2013”).

Although Bury Me at Makeout Creek has a far more dejected feel than her recent release, Puberty 2 surrenders to these dark themes, but challenges their melancholy through the strength of its own self-aware sadness. In this album, Mitski seems to “put on her white button-down” and face everything head-on.

The album opens with “Happy,” which articulates an accurate view of the “Netflix and chill” culture and those ramifications. Two other songs off the album, “A Loving Feeling” and “Once More to See You,” have a similar vibe—however, “A Loving Feeling” is a much more ironically upbeat number.

“I Bet on Losing Dogs” and “Thursday Girl” are two of my favorite songs on the album, despite being two of its slowest. Both definitely have a dark feel with nice, heavy melodies that are perfect for listening to at 3a.m. or even while going for a jog.

“My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars” brings up a similar apprehension toward adulthood as in “Class of 2013,” but with more of a classic punk vibe (I am here for that distortion). In this song she talks about not being able to pay rent, yet “wanting to see the world” and trying to “ace an interview”—all things manypost-college graduates are currently experiencing.

“Your Best American Girl” was the first single from the album, and definitely one of the best. Watching the video makes it even more relatable and, like, ugh. It also seems like she’s making fun of (generally, white) music festival culture (so American) and makes out with her own hand—even though the video seems quirky and a bit tongue-in-cheek, there is still a lot of depth within the video itself. To be real, this song speaks to me on so many levels…the “I do, I finally do” in the last verse always gives me chills.

In “A Burning Hill,” the final song of the album, she describes herself as “a forest fire” (quite different from the Dead Kennedys song). With an atmospheric timbre appropriate for a finale, the most powerful lyric in the song may be: “I stand in a valley watching it and you are not there at all.” Honorable mentions go to “Fireworks” and “Dan the Dancer.”

She may not have “hit it big” just yet, but Mitski undoubtedly deserves to become (as I predict she will) one of the most influential musicians of our generation, and surely already is for countless budding musicians (myself inclu
ded)—which makes it kinda hard to write an unbiased review, and to stop to watch her live performances on YouTube while writing this. Ultimately, Mitski’s music is the kind that is so powerfully personal and so emotionally raw that I cannot help but be reminded of that quote at the end of Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000), when William asks Russell what he loves about music, and he responds as Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” plays in the background:, “To begin with, everything.”

Mitski will be performing at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston on November 1st. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Tricia Wise is a recent graduate of Clark University and an aspiring writer (and possibly makeup artist). To read more of her work, visit her blog at www.beantownbroads.com.

Alexandra Mason graduated from Ithaca College, New York, in 2014 with Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography. She is currently making her way around South America through different volunteer positions and home stays on Couchsurfing, Workaway, and Wwoof Latin America. She is continuously gaining new perspectives and learning about life, language, culture, money management, and letting go of the material.

We brought him home from the neighbor’s yard, where we found him stiff and cold, paws unnaturally curled and raised as if to fend something off. His teeth were bared a bit, but his eyes were closed.

A snow shovel wasn’t bier enough for what was so recently a purring, warm thing, so I brought up from the basement a cloth,

a green curtain that I had sewed long ago and which had once hung in the dining room of the Red House, where we fed babies with plastic spoons and marked time with small colored candles in cakes.

Now that’s buried too, wrapped around the cat whose body suddenly made sense again as we rolled him over and he looked like he was sleeping.

“He doesn’t look scared any more,” said the boy as we tucked in his friend and carried his body to the hill behind the fence,

stirring up papery orange leaves as we went.

We scooped fistfuls of light, silty soil over the bundle, and I felt how soft the dust was, falling through my fingertips,

while the girl whittled a stick with gritted teeth, scraping away the bark in short, sharp strokes.

She would not let me touch her.

As the boy and his father gathered stones to mark the spot, she broke the silence with a snap and plunged the stick into the earth above the grave

and walked away

past the silent beehive, so lately humming with purpose and now empty, a Roanoke of wax and honey abandoned and left for us to interpret as we will

We buried the cat at dusk,

and as I closed the gate behind me my eyes were already adjusting to the dark.

Elizabeth Trach is a writer and editor living in Newburyport, MA. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She also sings in a band, grows almost all her own food, and occasionally even cooks it. You can catch up on all her adventures in extreme gardening at

I remember how it was before he left. The sun was shining a brilliant gold, the way that it does in late afternoon on a day somewhere between summer and autumn. The sky was a light shade of blue with those big fluffy clouds that change shape the longer you looked at them, the kind that when they traveled over the sun you could see its rays glimmering through. We were lying perpendicular to one another underneath a tree whose leafy shadow covered our bodies with a funny speckled pattern. There was a gentle breeze dancing through the treetops and whispering over our bodies. I remember the grass not only being a vibrant green but also soft, not the feeling of being freshly mowed, but more as if it had been mowed two days before. The breeze was telling jokes to the grass, causing the blades to bend over in silent laughter and tickle my bare feet. My head was resting on his chest and I could hear his slow breathing and beating heart, I couldn’t help but smile whenever there was an irregularity in that beating. The only sound apart from the dancing leaves was the crisp, quick rustle as we turned the pages of our books. We didn’t speak much that day, the majority of our communication was through the quiet smiles we shared and the way his free hand stroked my arm. It wasn’t that we were angry with each other, or that we had nothing to say to one another, it was that we didn’t need to say anything to know what the other was thinking. I closed my eyes and inhaled through my nose as he brought his hand away from his mouth and let the smoke twist up and weave its way through the gentle breeze. He smiled as the last of it escaped his lips; he knew how much I loved the smell.

That was the first time we danced. He stood up abruptly and pulled me to my feet with him. The air had a thick amber glow as the sun inched closer to the horizon. He grabbed my hand and spun me, then pulled me close. We didn’t know the steps to any fancy ballroom dance so he made up his own silly waltz, holding me tight, making sure I never got left behind. He dipped me and I laughed, a full laugh, the kind that makes your whole body shake, the contagious kind that makes anyone within earshot laugh with you. I felt light, like that feeling you get after two glasses of red wine. In fact that’s how I felt, I felt like red wine. I was filled to the brim with warmth and delight. I could feel my cheeks burning, becoming a color that matched the way I felt as the veil of night fell over our made-up waltz. He went to dip me again, but this time I fell, pulling him with me and we both laughed, our faces taken up entirely by the idiotic grins we wore. We lay back down, nuzzling against each other as the stars sparked into existence. He pointed out his favorite constellations; he even dedicated one of the stars to me, the brightest one at the corner of his favorite. We fell asleep in that spot, with the crescent moon promising she would protect us through the night. That was the last time we danced.

Melissa Mason is a senior English major at UMass Amherst with a specialization in Creative Writing. She plans to enter the world of publishing as an editor but her ultimate goal is to be a fantasy novelist.

The asphalt on the street radiated heat, causing beads of sweat to collect on the Magician’s forehead. It was a summer day in central Tokyo. The sweat dripped onto the flags he was pulling out from his mouth. He stood behind a portable table set up on the street. He had been there for an hour, entertaining audiences that came and went, as he kept pulling out flags one after the other.

Once, he had wanted to be an athleter. He remembered the summer of the first Tokyo Olympics a generation before. It was similarly sweltering. Each afternoon the Magician would run to his neighbor’s house, which was the only home with a television, with a small gang of boys. They kicked off their sandals as they hurried to the television, already surrounded by men cheering and women gossiping. He huddled up to sneak through the adults to the front. With knees tightly pressed together, the Magician looked up into the screen where the female volleyball team ran and hit, ran and hit. Though the court must have been boiling with heat, the rough pixels of the television screen did not betray the sweat and the grind of the players, only their steady receives and attacks. Yes, the Magician remembered now: he wanted to be a volleyball player, not a baseball player. The lean female figures in the screen attracted him in ways that were still unknown to him, the stretch of their arms and the bow of their bodies reaching for a spike magical and dazzling. In that Olympic games the Japanese female volleyball team smashed opponents, winning the finals against the Soviet Union after a grueling game as the nation cheered in front of their respective communal TVs. The team was nicknamed the “Witches of the Orient.”

But did I really want to be a volleyball player? The Magician thought again, as he slipped his hands beneath the table to feel the pigeon that he would soon produce and then make disappear. Sure enough, she was there, safely blinded in a black box that confined her beneath the table. Volleyball, he remembered, became a girl’s sport after the gold medal of the Olympics. TV series and comic series featuring starry-eyed girls playing volleyball attracted girls nationwide, creating a huge surge in the popularity of the sport. But the Magician was never a part of it. Throughout elementary school he remained silent about his attraction, secretly dreaming of volleyball but never actually playing it. Baseball was the sport that he played in the open fields after school.

Baseball was a fine sport, but the Magician never wanted to be a professional like all the other boys. Once in high school, he quit his team and spent most of his time at the library. Sitting alone in the rustic room where dust flew with each touch of a book, the Magician read Dostoyevsky and Stendhal; Mishima and Soseki; he drank them down. He lost his childhood tan from playing baseball, but sunburnt the left side of his face by sitting in the same seat in the library every day. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to be in the future; his only vision was to have a solitary and literary life. So when the time came to go to college, he went where he got in. Magic, the Magician thought as he pulled out the pigeon from the box through his hat on the desk, was nowhere in his life back then. The closest he got to magic was Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But he did like to watch the college volleyball team. It was far from the Olympic team that had captured the eyes of the nation; many of the girls were round, healthy, and happy, and none of the stoic sportsmanship that ruled the court that summer was present in the old, sweaty college gym. Laughter bounced on the walls whenever the girls took a break. The Magician, now a tall, lean young man, liked to read on the stands while the team practiced. The toss of the ball, the yells of the girls, their sweats that the television screen never captured, all amidst the philosophical musings of Virginia Woolf, consumed him. Inhaling the stale air of the gym, he felt that he was in two worlds at once: the carnal reality of his childhood dreams and the spiritual realm of the philosophers. Skipping classes, he sat quietly in the back of the empty stands, reading away as the hours ticked by. A slight change occurred to this daily routine when the Magician’s eyes caught a particular girl in the court. She was the tallest and visibly more serious about the game than the other girls who were there for fun. The arch of her body was like a long, lean bow, and the ball her arm hit pierced the empty spot of the opponent’s court with a straight trajectory. The Magician fell in love. The balance between the two worlds shifted; his gaze would lift off the pages and fall on her. They dated for a while, but the girl dumped him after a few months for not paying enough attention to their relationship. He stopped going to the gym.

The Magician fell into deep despair. In his small apartment, he lay down on his futon and wondered about life. He had never known despair like this; none of the masterpieces of literature had taught him how the wounds of love hurt. After two weeks of solitude, he woke up. He decided that books never taught him anything: only hard-earned experience can. He even felt grateful for his girlfriend, for teaching him this truth.The Magician started to work part time jobs. On Mondays he tended bar; on Tuesdays he built houses in the rapidly expanding suburbs; on Fridays he organized rows of fish at the Tsukiji market. The rest of the week he filled in with one-time gigs.

Out of the myriad jobs that he tried, he most liked being a magician’s assistant. The job came to him unexpectedly, one day, on his way home from another one of his part-time jobs. He spotted a handwritten ad on a utility pole that said, “Looking for assistant to magician. Will teach how to do basic magic.”

When he rang up the number on the ad the next day, an old man answered. The man spoke softly and modestly, and the Magician, who had expected something like a pigeon popping up through the phone, checked the number on the note on the desk. But he was talking to the right man. Hearing that the Magician was interested in the assistant position, the old man’s voice brightened: “You are the first one to call!” he said, “I had almost lost hope. I am making an overseas trip to India next month, and I urgently need someone to work in my place while I am gone.”

The training process was much more arduous than the Magician had anticipated. The Master, who preferred to be called Master Ismail, taught him how to handle cards and control the audience’s attention, step by step, in his old apartment that was cluttered with elephant statues. He was a good teacher; he never got irritated by his pupil’s mistakes, and went over the same tricks again and again until the student perfected it. Except for his weird fascination with India, the Magician liked his master very much and trusted in his skills. Sometimes he was tempted to point out that Ismail is an Islamic name rather than Hindu; but out of love and respect, he never did, and sent his master out having surely mastered the basic magic tricks that he were to perform while the master spent six months traveling “forgotten magical tribes” in India.

Now the Magician had truly become a magician. He worked at the birthday parties of wealthy children, did tricks in the toy sections of department stores, and sometimes performed on the streets to advertise his work. Most of his audiences were children under the age of twelve; they beheld the cards that flew and the pigeons that disappeared in pure wonder, giggling and screaming with joy. As the Magician became more accustomed to his work, he realized he had graduated college. He only noticed this when, receiving an offer to perform at a wedd
ing, he saw that the date conflicted with his graduation ceremony. He didn’t mind too much; the only person from college that he ever really talked to was his volleyball-playing ex-girlfriend, and he did not care to meet her again. He accepted the offer and added a rabbit vanishing trick during the wedding ceremony as a personal celebration of his graduation.

Months came and passed. Master Ismail never came back; the Magician assumed that he had extended his stay in India, possibly having found his retirement destination in one of the magical tribes. The Magician was not in a hurry to hand back his position anyways. He had become a full-time magician upon graduation, expanding his network of customers. He met many people during his work; he congratulated arrivals of newborns, celebrated the coming-of-age of twenty year olds, and pulled out from his hat smiling photos of the deceased. One of the most surprising encounters during this time was with his ex-girlfriend from college. The Magician was asked to perform at a birthday party of a five-year-old boy for a hefty pay, and when he arrived at the doorsteps of a large western style house, she opened the door. The Magician recognized her right away: the quiet smile, the lean build of her body, the seriousness at the edge of her mouth. She did not recognize him, however, and invited him in with welcoming ease. The husband was not present for his son’s birthday party, but had made sure that the house was handsomely decorated by professional party planners, an uncommon practice. The air of restrained passion that she carried with her in college was gone, her eyes now tinged with fatigue. But the Magician was a professional; he was never to speak about personal matters with his client. As he steadily performed his routine, the Magician’s ex-girlfriend watched his tricks with a curious smile, paying more attention to her son’s reactions rather than the show. After he received the pay and left the house, the Magician never saw her again. Such was the way it was with most customers. People came and went, leaving behind traces of memories, a hint of laughter, a sparkle of the eye, but never a permanent connection – except for one serious eyed girl, who eagerly asked to be the Magician’s assistant one summer day, soon after the encounter with his ex-girlfriend. She later became his wife.

Years came and passed. Not much changed for the Magician; he performed his tricks in professional solemnity, visited birthday parties, and celebrated marriages. The venue today was on the street. As the drumroll from the CD speaker rolled, the pigeon vanished under the desk, successfully concluding his finale. The drumroll finished with a dramatic thud. The children, after a beat, clapped in wide-eyed wonder.

Moeko Noda is a senior in Swarthmore College, where she studies Comparative Literature. She is from Tokyo, Japan.

Though it may be difficult to believe, being born and raised in a war zone had its advantages.

It gives top-notch war material to write about, confirms that nothing is worse than a slow internet connection, and makes an exceptionally adept Call Of Duty player, dodging drone strikes as if I’ve done it for most of my life. In addition of being around Lady Death (occasionally having her over for a cup of tea) I also get to impress people with my tales of traveling through one of the Middle East’s many conflicts to get to the USA. They seem to admire me, as if I was the one who booked the plane ride, as if I was the one who took a bullet through his thighs, the one to see friends blownto pieces. Still, sometimes it’s nice to get credit for the horrible things I never gone through. I was only seven when I left Iraq, it didn’t matter to me.

Iraq to Jordan wasn’t much of an upgrade. I mean sure, no more exploding human beings or free bullets for everybody, but I daresay I would prefer that over to what I had to deal with over the 4 years I was there. I’m half serious, but that statement does have some truth in it. In Jordan, racism was the norm, and brawling was never an even fight, much less a fair one. It also wasn’t nearly as beautiful as my Baghdad. The yellow skies and meager stars were not bright enough to light the streets like ours. Trees were scarce as gold, and even though the heat melted the tarmac, warm people were even harder to find. I was mocked by the kids because I spoke a different dialect. My tanned skin stood out as well. At some point, ten kids lined up, fighting each other for the right to fight me. At the age of nine I became so popular my parents took me out of school. My response was making my own little gang of several other minorities. We walked around with an arrogant swagger, until other gangs pulled out sticks or knives–that’s when we ran like hell.

There was more than enough food to eat with the family and friends, and we had a stable income with a decent apartment. It was relatively safe, if albeit a bit stagnant; each day was much like the one before that, except for that occasional adventure of course.

Here is the thing: Back in Iraq, people were terrifiedof dying; I found that funny, since in essence, they were terrified of entering heaven with the help of people who wanted to enter heaven by killing them. The countless soap operas that intensified death and betrayal, kidnapping and ransom, corruption and human greed, did not help. Neither did the news, which primarily focused on broadcasting children with missing limbs and bloody clothes, or images of the mother, holding the bloody and ragged body of her child as her screeches played in the background. I found those channels more efficient than the terrorists themselves. They were doing the job of a terrorist, spreading terror and hopelessness–but only better, and on a world scale. People–including my parents–became paranoid. They looked for someone or something to blame for what’s wrong with this world. But since it’s wrong to blame a person, they went for blaming an entire race.

As grim as that sounds, It reminds us just how precious life is. Funny how you need to see heads flying until you realize that. YOLO; You only live once. We didn’t need a song to remind us of that, since we never knew when a bullet or shell would end it. But here, in Jordan, there was none of that. Their laughs were genuine, as were their smiles, but it wasn’t full. It was missing something, and I didn’t know what. At some point, I started missing Lady Death. She taught me that life is beautiful, and I appreciated each fleeting moment of it.

I was full of joy when I left Jordan, much more than when I left Iraq. The ride, though, was agonizing. We spent hours past midnight waiting for the airplane that may or may not come. The storm outside didn’t seem to care though, its winds bellowing as if it had nothing better to do. There was little to no sleep, as we constantly had to move around the airport alongside other immigrants, all of us scurrying around like a bunch of chickens without their heads.The coldness of the airports didn’t help either. It seeped through my puffy coat, rendering a moment of comfort scarce in the four-day journey, more so for my anxious parents. The broken sleep rendered my memories vague and colorless, yet I’m almost certain that each airport we reached loathed us, as if the rest of the world was not enough.

We had reached Boston, Massachusetts, in the middle of its strongest storms during the end of 2008. It was as if the world was entirely covered in storm, from one edge to another. It was my first time witnessing the sight of snow and its chilling touch. It both terrified and exhilarated me. It felt like a present from God, his white snow a blessing. I enjoyed the snow at first. There was more than enough snow for me to swim and drown pleasantly in; an amount that only seemed to increase with each gust of wind full of an endless amount of snow flakes. The movies made snow seem so glamorous, pure, and majestic, yet they didn’t seem to mention how it melted on your cheeks and made you cold, or how it soaked into your clothes and made you even colder, or how it filled the sidewalks and forced you to walk on the streets, where the pure white snow become a contorted mess of black and brown that splattered on you with each passing car. It didn’t take long for me to start to hate it as much as it hated me.

I watched it stretch from a taxi window on my mother’s lap. It extended endlessly, covering everything in white from the Boston airport to the apartment that was rented for us in Worcester– the less desirable but cheaper city next to Boston. The landlord received us after the taxi dropped us off, leading us into an apartment that’s door had frozen solid. The door had to be forced open with a shoulder.The apartment had three rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and two living rooms, all equally frozen solid. Sleeping outside, the snow being my blanket, might have made me warmer. Except for the Kentucky Chicken and a gallon of milk in the refrigerator ( the American diet) the apartment was desolate. After laying down the mats, I and my two brothers slept in the first room, my parents in the second, leaving the third vacant. We would receive food, furniture, toys, appliances, heating, and hot water after the snowstorm calmed, three days later.

Adam Maarij was born in Iraq and immigrated to America at the age of eight. He attends South High school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enjoys soccer, running, reading, writing, and procrastinating.

Nobody knows that I come here at night, every night; nobody even cares enough to notice. I sneak out of my uncle’s cabin before he is even asleep, while he is still sitting like a fat drooling dog in front of the TV drinking his tenth beer. He doesn’t care about me, he barely even knows my name, but he loves my mother and would do anything for her. Uncle Earl adopted me every summer for the past three years while Mother went on “work trips,” which is code for her going on tropical cruises and getting shitfaced with boys who are closer to my age than hers. This summer though she didn’t come back to get me. She sent a text to Earl telling him about her “new young love, we are moving to Greece, tell Amy to study hard.” That was it. No I love you, no goodbyes, just study hard. Fat lot of good that did. Earl forgot to register me for school this year. He messed up his leg a few years ago working construction, and since then he’s been living off disability claiming that his leg never healed right. He sits day in and day out in front of his static-y TV in his tiny three-roomed cabin in the middle of the woods.

Most people my age find the woods a terrible and forsaken place. I think it’s magical–the soft carpet of the emerald moss that curls around my bare toes as I bound away from Earl’s place, the sweet rainbow leaves that blow all about in the wind and tickle my face

I found this place at the beginning of my third summer dumped at Earl’s. That first day was the only day he was sober, just to impress his sister. As soon as she left he chugged five beers and retreated to his chair, forever imprinted with his walrus butt.

When I was sure that he was good and drunk, I went exploring. I was traveling along a path in the woods when I tripped on a root, got caught in indigo vines and crashed into a clearing, smacking my head on the ground. I have no idea how long I was unconscious for, but when I finally awoke, little cobalt lights darted into the trees. I untangled myself from the vines and gasped. How had I never seen this part of the woods before? The leaves on all of the trees surrounding the clearing were a brilliant red, a velvety red sort of like that of blooming roses, but warmer. The tall grass, which was softer than the moss and logically should not have even existed in this shaded space, reached a shade of green to rival a jade stone, the same kind that was on the ring Dad was buried with. All openings in the trees were obscured by the indigo vines I was caught in.

I lie in the middle of this field now, as I have every night since the day I found it. I lay here and I watch the cobalt lights flitter about. Because they are not just lights, they are creatures. They float through the air and live in the red trees. They dance in the grass to the sound of the stars. They have grown accustomed to my presence; in fact I think they have begun to look forward to my visits. They look like fairies but they are not, they may not even be alive. I thought they were until the day three of them floated straight through my stomach. I didn’t even feel them, I just watched them enter from my front and leave out the back. As I lie here they swarm in and around me. One has placed herself on the tip of my nose. She is eerily beautiful. My little lights, that’s what I call them, and they respond to it so they must like it. They have accepted me and care for me and provide me with warmth even on the coldest of nights. Maybe one day I will be able to join them, flitting about without a care in the world, becoming a little cobalt light myself. Until that day comes I will continue to sit here and watch them.

Melissa Mason is a senior English major at UMass Amherst with a specialization in Creative Writing. She plans to enter the world of publishing as an editor but her ultimate goal is to be a fantasy novelist.

“Hip-hop has always been about bragging and boasting,” Eminem once told 60 Minutes and he was partly right. Mainstream hip-hop music has always had a reputation for the genre’s recurring themes of money, drugs, and women, evoking for those outside the community what may now be a stereotypical image of conceited rappers boasting about gold chains and the bevies of prostitutes in their narcotic-filled Ferraris. Many artists, however, employ hip-hop as a tool for protest and spreading awareness. Kendrick Lamar is one of them.

Born and raised in Compton, California, Lamar endured the struggles of living with gang tensions, poverty, drug dealings, poor education, and a bizarre environment throughout his adolescence. To Pimp a Butterfly, an album he released in 2015, compassionately addresses this amongst other issues. One song, “Alright,” revolves around the power of determination and optimism in the face of the much publicized police shootings of the past few years.

“Blacker the Berry” is a bitter reflection on self-hatred in the African American community. The album brings awareness to issues of racial discrimination, certainly, but also to the fact that, often, these communities are in their own conflict of hatred and violence in the form of gang tension and crime. Drawing on his own experiences of growing up in the midst of two infamous rival gangs, the Crips and Bloods, Lamar created more vivid imagery of this bellicose environment in his earlier song, “m.A.Ad city.” With lines like, “Pakistan on every porch, we adapt to crime. Pack a van with four guns at a time” and “‘AK’s, AR’s ‘Ay y’all duck’. That’s what momma said when we was eating the free lunch.”

The most personal song in the album is undoubtedly “u,” in which Lamar scrutinizes his insecurities and the plagues of reaching fame, even calling himself a “failure.” He despises himself for abandoning his family in Compton after attaining fame and fortune, and regrets his decision to refrain from suicide. This song has a significant place in the album, exposing Kendrick Lamar as an icon and inspiration who is vulnerable enough to reveal his insecurities and personal problems.

As a meaningful contrast to “u”, “i” is a jubilant song of contentment and self-love. With radiant instrumentation and the catchy “I love myself” hook, Lamar shelters his listeners from the negativity of his community, and instead emphasizes the importance of self-love and gratitude. Taking a welcome break from the self-loathing and social issues which pervade throughout the album, “i” is Lamar’s offer of optimism through hip-hop, as he uses the song to encourage a unified sense of strength, pride, and self-respect among the African American community.

“Mortal Man” is the final song on To Pimp a Butterfly, a lasting remark from Lamar where he questions the loyalty of his fans and affirms his responsibility in leading and influencing the youth. After exhorting his community to persevere in the midst of discrimination and self-hatred, Lamar feels that he is not only an artist, but an iconic leader. Throughout his hooks, he affirms his responsibility in prolonging the legacy of influential icons such as Nelson Mandela when he says, “The ghost of Mandela, hope my flows they propel it,” and later acknowledges himself as a flawed leader when he says, “As I lead this army, make room for mistakes and depression.” Though Lamar seems to accept his role in the public eye and in the African American community, he is still apprehensive about making mistakes, knowing he is only a “mortal man,” showing us another angle of his insecurity when he asks his audience, “When shit hit the fan, is you still a fan?”

To Pimp a Butterfly will continue to have a lasting impact on hip-hop music and society as an example of how hip-hop as a platform can be utilized for far more than just entertainment. Its ripples are already being felt, and since its release we have seen more of the social action side of hip-hop . J. Cole, another very prominent and mainstream hip-hop artist, was recently featured in a song called “Jermaine’s Interlude,” where he refers to the issue of police brutality. In July, West Coast rap artists Snoop Dogg and The Game led a peaceful march protesting police brutality. Both artists were once member of rival gangs.

It’s too early to say whether Kendrick will become a figure comparable to Martin Luther King Jr., but there is no doubt that he is, like them, bringing attention social and motivating people to persevere–except Kendrick is doing it with some funky hip-hop beats.

Tazwar Ferdous is a junior at Hopkinton (Massachsetts) High School and has been writing as a hobby for a few years. He is currently interning at The Worcester Journal.

In my home growing up, summer meant reading. More the indoor, imaginative types than rough-and-tumble summer camp kids, my siblings and I reveled in our library’s summer reading program, and savored those blissful months of seemingly infinite time to read.

Now, as a graduate perpetually attempting to stay caught up with the excess of pop culture news and trends that invade my social media, I find reading for reading’s sake is a slow-paced and almost impossible luxury. Now, however, as my first post-collegiate summer draws to an end and the years of True Adulthood loom ever more closely, I was recently brought back to those elementary and middle school summers, in ways both parallel and disparate, with two of the latest and most significant commodifications of literature of my childhood. First, there was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part (confusing way of saying ‘four act’) play written by Jack Thorne based on J.K. Rowling’s universe and story (supposedly), which came out in the tradition of those golden midnight release parties of yore on July 31 of this year, a holy day for any true Potter fan who knows it to be the birthday of both Ms. Rowling and Harry himself. Then Mark Osborne’s feature-length animated take on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 novella The Little Prince premiered on Netflix after being rejected by Paramount for unknown reasons just a week before its scheduled release in spring.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that both The Little Prince and the Harry Potter series are among the most significant and timeless works of children’s literature written thus far, along with others like Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia—both of which, in case you haven’t seen, have already received (and, as has been recently announced, will continue to receive) their 21st century commercial cinema treatment—which is why I find the coincidental timing of these two releases almost as eerily enchanting as when Toy Story 3 came out dangerously close to my own high school graduation and hometown goodbye. I think it’s also safe to say that, although there are certainly merits and weaknesses to both Cursed Child and Little Prince, what their side-by-side premieres illustrate most glaringly is that there is a right way to handle such beloved material—with a true sense of the original’s spirit and values, a deep respect for the characters and their creator, and the creative sense and imagination to invent something wholly new while preserving the integrity of its source material—and there’s a wrong way.

Other Potterheads may disagree, but I have to say that Cursed Child does it wrong. I’m not even one of those anti-revisionist fans who spew bitter canon-only comments about Pottermore and the seemingly boundless lengths the film industry will go to ensure the immortality of the franchise (in fact, while I’m not convinced of the necessity of five of these prequel films, I’m quite looking forward to seeing Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander in the upcoming November release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)—no, I was fully prepared to give Cursed Child all the chances in the world. Having read positive reviews of the West End production in London and (internally) cheering when Noma Dumezweni was cast as Adult Hermione, I went to Nonesuch Books straight after work on August 1 and paid full price for my hardcover copy of the rehearsal script.

The summertime connection with the series was always especially felt, for although reading any Potter book by a fire in the middle of a snowstorm is sure to evoke the Hogwarts coziness from the first two films, one can never quite erase the seasonal association with the book release parties, Harry’s birthday, and the fact that summer was always the worst time for Harry. His isolation among the Dursleys paralleled our own as we immersed ourselves in his world and looked forward to getting to his school year, which was always rich enough to fill the empty space of summer vacation. Indeed, I recall one summer between fourth and fifth grade when I read almost nothing but Prisoner of Azkaban, starting and finishing and starting over until I’d read it cover to cover a total of—I believe—36 times. Cursed Child hardly ranks that high on any scale of engagement, but it was a sort of pleasant surprise when I actually lay in bed reading late into the night as I had not done in years, smiling at some of the surprises that came up. (Albus as Slytherin! Hermione as Minister of Magic! Scorpius as sweet and completely benign!) Those were the moments that almost made me feel like a fourth grader, eating up the magic universe for the first time again.

Unfortunately, those moments were few and far between. Before I even attempt to address the myriad plot failures and character mutilations, the physical act of reading the script is jarring in itself. Even for someone who’s read a fair share of scripts and screenplays in her life, the scene changes happen what feels like entirely too fast for the most part, with blackouts and elaborate set changes on nearly every other page. Though I tried to assure myself with each jolting transition that it’s probably better if you see it onstage,I have sincere doubts about the efficacy of whatever stage tricks and technical effects they’re using to create the magic described in the somewhat poorly-written stage directions. Has Jack Thorne ever read a play before? I was forced to ask myself at times. Has Jack Thorne ever read a Harry Potter book, even?Based on his characterization of Ron alone, I’m inclined to say no. I would hope that any Potter fan would be capable of portraying Ron as more than the flat caricature of comic relief he apparently grows up to be, and able to paint Harry’s feelings toward fatherhood with significantly more nuance. Cursed Child was obviously not written by Rowling’s pen and, providing almost nothing but dialogue, the play glaringly lacks the distinct narration of the novels. The lines in between conversations were full of descriptions and details in Rowling’s own voice which were just as much a part of the reading experience as the intricate plotlines and complex characters.

Speaking of plotlines…ah, where to begin? To be honest, I’m not even sure I should. I initially allowed myself to be entertained by the absolutely labyrinthine mess of the plot Thorne concocted (from what I now confidently assume were photocopied pages of the back cover summaries), but the more I read reviews comparing the whole script to bad fan fiction, the more I can’t help but surrender to the plain and simple truth that not every fan theory deserves to be brought to life. (Unsurprisingly, comparisons have already been drawn to the infamous “My Immortal” fanfiction from 2006-2007—if you haven’t heard of it, it is imperative that you read a few lines, any lines, or at least read the Wikipedia article about it.) Yes, sure, I appreciated the bones thrown to the Malfoy/Hermione shippers and the Bellatrix/Voldemort shippers, and yes, the idea of an alternate world where Hermione is a fugitive warrior queen and Cedric is a Death Eater is undeniably intriguing, but this sentence alone captures only what I estimate to be around 7% of the totally unnecessary and indiscriminate events that occur in the course of this four-act play.

The Little Prince, by comparison, isan enormous success. Running at 108 minutes with an all-star cast of voice actors, Osborne’s vision of the little boy who lived on a planet hardly bigger than himself uses the skeleton of Saint-Exupéry’s story and manages to build it into a completely new narrative. This is clearly what Cursed Child attempts or overconfidently thinks it is doing, but this new version of The Little Prince is remarkable for how harmoniously it seems to create a contemporary fable while also capturing the soul of the original book. Adaptation is a tricky thing, for both adaptors and observers; many film scholars don’t even really consider it worth studying, because how can you truly compare one medium to another? It’s apples and oranges, most of the time. In this case, though, the differences are not quite so vast; more like oranges and nectarines.

As with Cursed Child, or any adaptation, The Little Princetakes some liberties with its source material, adding the entirely new characters of The Little Girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy) and The Mother (Rachel McAdams), who exist in a busy, modern world not unlike our own; obsessed with progress and productivity, training from an unreasonably young age to prepare for adulthood, studying all the answers test-makers want to hear, forsaking play for work, even on summer vacation. Just as in the book, there’s an emphasis on the “strangeness of adults” that feels more relevant and more heartbreaking than ever. The film swings heavily at helicopter parenting, standardized testing, and the educational application process that seems to be starting earlier and earlier, encouraging the pursuit of extremes to the disadvantage of anything in between.

Most of these details are not in Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 book, but it is exactly the kind of society for which the wisdom of his Little Prince was an antidote. “What is essential is invisible to the eye” remains one of the book’s most famous through lines and main themes, and comes up both directly in the film’s presentation of the aviator’s story and discreetly in the beginning, as we see a row of intimidating posters in the bleak hallway of an elite academy: “What will you be when you grow up? Essential.”

The movie is playful and clever in all the ways the Prince would want it to be—even Osborne’s decision to use both the Pixar-like computer animation for The Little Girl’s world and stop-motion animation for her vision of the Little Prince’s adventures demonstrates this—because why not? These are the kind of creative choices that make the movie feel so novel while carrying on what was at the heart of the classic little French tale, giving us all its sweeping philosophical suggestions and simplicity.

Striking, too, is how seamlessly Osborne fits his film into the theoretical canon of the original book. When The Little Girl befriends the aviator (Jeff Bridges) and begins saving the pages and illustrations he sends to tell the story of The Little Prince (which, in another wonderful detail, appear to be in their original French), we know that what she is collecting will become the book from which her own story originates, the one the world grew to know and love enough to want to see this very movie. Even with a few forgivable lines thrown in for pure comic effect and perhaps one too many extraneous endings, Osborne’s version of The Little Prince is undoubtedly one of the finer examples of an adaptation that lovingly respects its source and provides a modern retelling of the wisdom of children to enchant another generation.

Ultimately achieving what the Harry Potter books and others like them did and still do, the film creates a space of pure escapism that still, somehow, feels like it is about you and your world—because, really, this is what all great children’s literature does. As we transition through seasons and slowly grow into adults, these stories and these characters continue to remind us not to forget how it felt when everything around us seemed like magic and all the magic seemed to be real.

Sasha Kohan is a recent graduate of Clark University and hopes to pursue a career in pop culture writing. To read more of her work, visit her website at www.sashakohan.com.

I used to see works by Pablo Picasso as an incomprehensible jumble of shapes, swirls of colors, with maybe a face somewhere in the picture. “Night Fishing at Antibes” changed my perception of the artist, because there’s way more to the jumble of shapes than I first thought.

The painting has elements from the cubist period and of course an emphasis on geometric figures, with aspects of surrealism and primitiveness in it as well. But it’s an unusual painting for a Picasso. It’s rare to find one of his paintings with both a landscape and figures in it, and the only other painting like it is Guernica. The swirl of colors, the figures meant to be seen, the sense of foreboding, the sense of death, make this painting resonate with me. It has a story to tell.

In the center of the painting the fisherman has a fishing line tied to his foot, looking for fish. Another fisherman holds a spear in his hand, a hand that is the most realistically drawn part of the picture. He is poised, captured just before he drives the spear into a fish. Above them is the moon, and to the right of the fisherman are two lights to help them find fish. The fishermen seem to be fused together, with one head strong and actively pursuing the fish, while the other seems anxious and passive, waiting with a fishing line at his foot, a fish just about passing him. The two different fishermen could be a representation of how Picasso felt about himself, or was meant to resonate with the viewer.

Two women stand on the shore. The one licking an ice cream cone and with the bicycle is presumably Picasso’s mistress, with her phallic head and enhanced body features that bear resemblance to his lover of the time. Next to her is a woman with her arms outstretched, seemingly calling to the fisherman. This would be Picasso’s wife, Olga, because of the figures likeness of the real life Olga. In the left corner of the painting is a purple mass with two towers, the Chateau Grimaldi in Antibes, France.

This painting was completed in August of 1939, with World War 2 just on the horizon. Picasso was in Antibes at the time and Europe was filled with uncertainty and fear. This painting also came two years after the Spanish Civil war, and the depiction of Guernica. But this is a different kind of war painting. The spear has not yet plunged into the fish, and although the spear is on the brink of the final blow, there’s still a small amount of hope that the fish will be pardoned. The women stand on an an unsteady jetty, the moon seems to be hurtling toward the beach, and the city of Antibes resembles ruins. There is no blood, guts or horror. Picasso doesn’t need to show the viewer a soldier; the quiet uneasiness hints of a world at the brink of chaos.

But the spear hasn’t claimed the life of the fish. The hand gripping the spear is strong and certain in its task. This captured moment of hesitation perhaps reflects the tension the world was feeling as events in Nazi Germany unfold.

Of course, the personal significance of this painting is for the painter is his alone to know. But the feelings of tension and uncertainty are relevant, no matter the time period. This painting speaks to me because there’s more too it than just night fishing. For me, this piece in particular, unique to Picasso’s style, speaks volumes about the world at such an uncertain time in human history. In today’s news and in individual lives there always lies aspects of uncertainty, of apprehension, and a fear of what is to come. But amidst the colors and the figures and the landscape, there is the hand gripping the spear that threatens death but . A hand that is real and familiar. A hand that holds creates two radically different possibilities for death or a small sliver of hope.

This is not just “a Picasso.” This is a testament to our own lives, and what lays ahead.

SUPERMARKET, 1960s. – A New York City supermarket / The Granger Collection / Universal Images Group / Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

To the woman at Food Fair who screamed at her child last Tuesday somewhere between the boxed cereal and the bread aisle:

She heard you.

You didn’t have to call her a little bitch, wrenching her arm behind her, sending hot rivers of tears down her dirty cheeks, washing away stains from a day spent sitting in straight rows, eyes forward, feet on the floor inside a dark classroom by the cafeteria where her federal free lunch of half a cheese sandwich, green peas, canned peaches and lukewarm two-percent milk is served five days a week promptly at 11:20 a.m.

She needs answers. And hugs. And time to play with you and talk about ideas and places and things that would fill her mind instead of the worry and sorrow that creeps in when she is left to herself with no one to show her how to be a kid.

Children have a short shelf life. Before you can blink, it’s expired, and she’ll be all dented and past-date, just like you. What happened to “new and improved?” Where’s the happy? Look in aisle five, or maybe next to produce.

To the woman at Food Fair who screamed at her child last Tuesday evening: I know it’s hard to be poor and to feel like there’s nothing you can do about it. But you can do something about this living, breathing, smart girl who is hungry. For your attention. And to feel your arms swoop her from the floor and into the cart, even though she’s too big to ride in the buggy.

A girl who hangs on every word you say. Who wants to play and be loved. Who doesn’t understand why she can’t have a gumball from the machine in the lobby.

And… Why does it make you so mad when I ask, mommy? Yes, I heard you, mommy, please don’t yell. I’m sorry, mommy. My arm. Mommy, I promise I won’t cry…

If you just stop.

Sarah Diamond Burroway is a Kentucky writer. Her essays and poetry are included in the 2015 and 2016 Women of Appalachia Project. Sarah’s plays and monologues produced in New York, California, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. She is pursuing her Master of Fine Art in Writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University.

New York subway / Peter Carroll / All Canada Photo / Universal Images Group Rights Managed / For Education Use Only

It was a cold, dry night this past January. I was listening to music on the subway platform and fighting to stave off sleep. I adjusted the buds to fit snugly in my ear canals and pressed the volume button on my phone through my jeans. A plump, grey rat scurried across the tracks, scavenging for morsels of food and fighting to survive the winter. I squinted at the scuttling sewer-dweller and empathized with the rat, wondering if he, too, just wanted to get home at such a late hour. A decrepit pillar, stained brownish-yellow through millions of interactions with dirty New Yorkers, propped up my weary body. It was two in the morning.

I’d spent the evening in Manhattan with my brother. We watched a jazz band in the park as the last glimpses of the pale, winter sun faded behind the skyscrapers. We braved the cold, gloomy night, trying a new restaurant downtown and enjoying a few beers at a comedy club. I lingered late into the evening watching baseball at his apartment. Now I just wanted to get home, to get off my feet, and sleep.

I left my post on the pole to peer down the tunnel. A white glow, growing brighter, spread down the tile wall of the tunnel. I exhaled. The subway emerged through the black archway from a tunnel of immense, haunting depth into the station. The train was a snake, uncoiling itself gradually until you could see the full extent of its massive body.

The subway had bright, fluorescent, white lights and powder blue benches. The walls were made of the cold, silver steel which composed so much of the city. A seated man with sharp whiskers, paint-stained jeans and scuffed brown boots laid his head on an aggressive advertisement. His eyes were closed and his barrel chest heaved up and down with his breath. A young couple with clasped hands communicated with glances, not words. They massaged each other affectionately to stay awake. The car was silent. When I removed my earbuds, my ears rang in response to the quiet.

I advanced one train car every time the train stopped. I’d boarded at the middle of the train, but the station I needed to get off at lined up with the train’s last car. Walking between cars while the train is moving could’ve earned me a ticket, so at every stop I waited at the back door of the train car, hopped onto the platform when the train stopped, and walked into the next car before the train left the station.

After three stops I reached an empty car. I walked to the end and sat by the door, tapping my foot to the beat of my music. Vacant subway cars made me anxious. Silence is fleeting in New York City, and the peace of an empty subway car always feels temporary, like disruption is inevitable. I felt I was lounging beneath a greying sky on a summer day. I was enjoying the heat, but I knew the sky would open up any minute. Looking through the scratchiti-stained window to my right, I was relieved to see one woman sitting at the end of the next car.

When I entered the next car, I was surprised to see the woman was not alone. A man wearing khaki pants and a hoodie, which veiled his face, lay on the floor at her feet. His arms and legs were splayed like a starfish. The woman’s face was also obscured by the hood of her jacket, and the two of them were still when I entered the car. It’s common practice for subway riders to look your way when you step into a car late at night. Either the mysterious figures didn’t know I was there, or they were pretending not to.

Fear and suspicion pushed the drowsiness from my body. I plastered my back against a door at the foot of end of the car I walked in through, making sure to stay as far away from the mysterious figures as possible. I kept my eyes trained on the other passengers. For someone who had never been mugged, I was immediately suspicious and defensive. I was taught that the city is a dangerous place, perhaps more dangerous than it really is. But I knew I wanted nothing to do with these people. Those still subway riders could’ve been violent criminals feigning sleep, trying to lure me closer and preparing to pounce.

Who passes out on the floor of the subway? I thought. These people were reckless. They got too drunk and too high and couldn’t make it home. If these people were a danger to themselves, I reasoned they could have harmed me when they woke from their inebriated slumber. I never considered that the subway may’ve been the only place these passengers could sleep.

I focused on my perceived danger and the strangers kept dozing. I pushed myself harder and harder into the subway door, as if I could camouflage into the train wall. The passengers were impossibly flat and still, like pancake batter sizzling on a griddle. Even the harshest jolts and ear-splitting screeches emitted from the train didn’t phase them. During normal, sober sleep, people stir. They adjust themselves during the constant struggle to satisfy the weary body. So I decided the strangers were either too wasted for me to wake them up or dead. I’d read news stories where citizens stumble across corpses on the subway. Bodies are found in the tracks, or on empty cars late at night, and even sitting upright on crowded train during the day. Hoping I had better luck than the New Yorkers in the papers, I tiptoed down the car to investigate.

When I walked to the end of the car, I saw the man on the floor was frozen. The woman’s body bounced slightly with the rhythm of the train. I reached the man first and I leaned over his sprawled body to take a look at his face.

I have never seen someone die from suffocation, but I thought the man was dying from a lack of oxygen. His head was tilted back. His chin pointed up slightly and the top of his skull rested on the subway floor. The skin and fat on his face and neck bunched up towards the center of his face, resembling rolls of fat on a stomach. His chin was maroon and the color only grew darker and more purple towards the top of his skull, where blood was pooling. I could barely make out the thin slits which were once his eyes. It was hard to imagine this swollen, bloody pulp of a face contorting into a recognizable human expression ever again.

I didn’t need to look at the girl. Her face was still veiled to me, but I couldn’t look anymore.

Heroin, I thought.

I looked up at the electronic graphic to see how far I was from home. I was two stops away, which roughly equates to five minutes. Gnawing at my fingernails, I knew what I was going to do. It was not what I should do and I hated myself for the decision already. If I pulled the emergency break at the next stop and demanded that the train stop and help come immediately, it would mean I had to get out at the next stop and make the hour-long walk home at two-thirty in the morning. I chose to wait until my stop to get help. I chose to avoid an inconvenience instead of trying to save a life.

It won’t make a difference, I’ve waited so long already, I told myself. Every minute made a difference. I was selfish. I was a murderer.

I sat down at the o
ther end of the car and tried not to think about the passengers who were in need of help. I couldn’t honestly tell myself they’d be fine. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, but I kept imagining swelling pools of dark, red blood filling the subway car. The blood in the car was my blood and I couldn’t move. A man and a woman looked at me lying on the ground and watched the life leave me. They whispered to each other that I could wait for help to arrive. They said I was reckless so I probably deserved to die. When I opened my eyes, my face was wet with tears. It was my stop.

I leapt off the train, but kept my arm in the doorway to prevent it from closing. A subway worker, donning the token dark blue cap and blue button down shirt, walked down the platform in my direction. I yelled to him.

“You need to get help, now,” I said. “Two people… I think they overdosed on heroin. They’re not breathing. In this car. Please get help.”

Brushing past me, he walked into the car as the doors closed. He looked at the splayed man and the motionless girl for a moment. Then he walked to the opposite end of the car, as far away from the helpless passengers as possible, and sat down. He rotated his body ninety degrees, using the end of the bench to support his back, put his feet up, and faced away from the passengers. He tipped his cap over his eyes. I watched the train roll away.

I was dusting a bookshelf when, with my usual grace, I managed to knock to the ground an old book that nobody had opened for years. The book crashed to the floor and out slipped a letter, yellow and musty, the handwriting an elegant looping cursive. The letter itself was brief, just a few lines. It was dated m May 18, 1914 and addressed to no one in particular. It was signed by Mrs. Warren R. Gilman, a well-to-do woman living on Oxford Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. The letter was a recommendation for my great-grandmother, Mary Kett.

Mary was an Irish immigrant who had left her home and family with just $10 in her pocket, arriving in the United States in 1907. She was hired by Mrs. Gilman to clean her house as a “second girl,” Whose primary job was laundry, as well as cleaning and cooking. Mary worked for Mrs. gilman for three years, and the recommendation letter notes that Mary, whose neatness, honesty, and cooking were all praised, was leaving the service of Mrs. Gilman to return to Ireland.

Mary never returned to Ireland. In fact, she never saw her family there again. Ana a year after leaving service, she married my great-grandfather.

Was Mary lying so that she could get out of an undesirable job with a good recommendation? Or could she have actually been planning on going to Ireland but instead met my great grandfather?

We’ll never really know. One of the challenges historians face when interpreting documents is lack of context. The meaning of documents is left for historians to determine, and many historical mysteries remain unsolved.

We often have so little to work on when trying to recreate the past. Today, there is a plethora of facts and information about everyone. Nothing is private. In our age of social media, it seems just about everything is available on that screen. Mary didn’t have social media, of course, and one cannot check her Facebook page or tweets to discover where life took her in the years following. But she did have what many of us yearn for in an age with an abundance of information: she had privacy. It’s frustrating to me that we will never know the full story behind this letter. How many other letters like this were lost to time? These small mysteries shaped the lives of our ancestors, possibly playing a role in shaping who we are today.

Recently, I drove through the downtown area of Worcester that is full of old houses that have seen better days. The house of her former employer is old and white, with an attic jutting out towards the street that appears to be meant for the servants. Perhaps Mary lived and slept there. The house and the street have fallen victim to the negligence of time, and the glamour and prestige they had once has faded. I wonder if Mary could have ever guessed her descendant would again come back to the house following her little paper trail. Will my great granddaughter find some old e-mails of mine, perhaps catching me in my own 100-year-old lie?

Maria Reidy is a Senior at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is captain of the varsity crew team, a member of National Honors Society, and a really bad driver.

Olive struck the ground with her foot as she drove her scooter over and over the same patch of sidewalk in front of her house. It was her car, and she was driving it to work; she must take care to stop at all of the stoplights and to never go above the speed limit. Her little sister, Amy, had decided to quit the game, but the disappointment was only temporary. She had her imaginary friends to play with, and they made good playmates.

When they left, though, things did get a bit lonesome. Worse still was when her friends would withdraw, leaving little Olive with the enemies. She knew that they were only visions, that they weren’t really there. The man with the long white-hair was likely a figment from a dream, and the devil voice a secret sadness within her. The other enemies would often come and go, torture her and then leave forever. But these two stuck around for an awful long time, and Olive knew that they could stay forever if they wanted to.

The two enemies had made the decision, it seemed, to disturb and make miserable every aspect of her life. The white-haired man, who would so often appear in her mind and then flash away just as quickly, was in the habit of whispering things of past that had never happened.

As the white-haired man would confuse and distort the world she lived in, the devil voice would demand of her the payment of every second of her life. Any action she strove to do, be it turning her scooter around, picking a Tupperware cup to drink out of from the cabinet, speaking, was to some extent controlled by the devil voice. She would decide to turn her scooter around clockwise instead of counterclockwise, and the voice would change her action: If you don’t turn it counterclockwise, you will be trapped in a different time continuum.While wanting to choose the large blue cup, the voice would rebuke her: You’d better choose the small green cup, or else I will go into your heart when you drink.If about to say hello to someone: Keep your mouth closed or you’ll go to hell.

The battle, was continual. Perhaps it was made worse by the third enemy, the enemy who was real, her new stepfather.

He was a strange man, strange in his appearance, strange in his manner, and strange most of all in his preference for love from children. His acts shook the ground and broke it apart, leaving the shards of restlessness on which her family stood to drift away from each other.

Olive felt that the situation would have been easier had it not been for the visions that haunted her. But, no, the white-haired man would visit her and fill her waking dreamland with his version of reality; the devil voice would prohibit any freedom and terrify her beyond belief.

The girls went into a kind of years-long trance. No amount of consolation or screaming and yelling could snap them out of—not a bit of cajoling from their mother or cruel mind games from their stepfather would rescue them from it. It tied the two sisters together, each a source of comfort for the other.

They would talk to each other of the brutishness of their stepfather. Perhaps that was why her sister had left their game today so early on—the conversation had come up again. And with it had come an argument-turned-agreement.

Her sister had asked, “Do you think we need to tell someone?”

Olive felt a surge of panic.

“No, only if it happens again. And then we need to tell each other first.”

“But it did happen again, last night,” said Amy softly.

No, Olive, don’t you dare give in. You know it’s better kept a secret. Don’t tell… or else. The devil voice. You really don’t want to find out what I can do to you.

“Well,” Olive faltered again. Inside, she argued with the voice. Amy was crying. “Well. what if we promise each other something? If it happens even one more time, we will tell each other and then give each other a month to tell someone.”

Amy seemed to follow what she meant. “Is it really a promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

The two shook hands like adults and looked each other in the eyes. “Okay. Who are we going to tell, then?”

“I don’t know. We should probably tell mom. But remember, only after a month if it happens again.”

Olive wondered if she find the courage to uphold that promise. And over the next few days she noticed that the devil voice was growing quieter, yet gaining strength in anger. Then there came a new voice, softer, clearly feminine.

Olive. Olive stared at the vision that began appearing, similar in ghostlike appearance to the white-haired man. It was a girl though, and much older than Olive. Olive. May we talk?

As much as Olive desired an escapade conversation, she had to decline the offer for fear of a permanent attachment to this potential enemy. “No. Please go away.”

I’ve come a long way to get here, little Olive. There are some things I need to tell you. Think of me as an older sister. The vision was becoming more vivid as the words grew clear.

“Fine, then. Go ahead.” It would be best to get this spiel out of the way before figuring a way to dispel this vision from her life.

The vision gently led her towards the backyard, where the two sat on bulging tree roots in the mossy shade.

I left you years ago. I am Olive.

Olive studied the figure. It certainly looked a bit like her, but it was too old. It was too different. “You aren’t really me.”

I’m you in the future, when you’re eighteen. I know I’m different, and it’s my fault that you came to be this way. When I left you, I found hatred and selfishness. It wasn’t until recently that I realized how much I left you alone to suffer. I thought I had done myself a favor, and therefore done you a favor, but the deeper into life I got I realized it wasn’t true. It seems that for every thing I left you alone to suffer, a reflection of it has shown up in my own life. Now I know your pain, and I am so sorry.

Olive looked down at the thick grass surrounding them, and kept herself quiet for a time. Without the devil voice here to interject its threats and commentary, she found it difficult to judge the veracity of this conversation. The vision seemed patient in that respect, and her silence brought Olive the encouragement to consider. “I really don’t know if this is real, but I forgive you.”

Thank you. Thank you ve
ry much. Her vision took a moment to examine the yard, as if remembering. May I ask you something?

Olive nodded.You need to tell someone. It’s hard, but it’s important.

Olive murmured her agreement.

Don’t leave yourself behind. Always stay with yourself; help yourself grow. Don’t hide, and do all you can to keep goodness in your heart.The vision was fading, and the different volume levels of the voices all mingled again. Her vision was gone, and again the devil voice came and scolded her on her belief of that vision. The white-haired man found evidence against her from his undocumented wealth of knowledge of time.

Upon returning inside, the sound of the swamp cooler overwhelmed her, and the sight of her stepfather slumped on the couch clutching his container of peanuts angered her. She walked quickly, silently, down the hallway into her shared bedroom, where she found Amy curled helplessly onto her bed. The music on the radio was turned low to her sister’s favorite band, and the beats and tunes of emotion mingled with her sobs.

“I just want mommy to come home from the store,” she sniffled. “I’m afraid of daddy.”

Olive climbed up onto the bed with her sister. “I am too. She’ll be back soon.”

of the condo his manager boughthim when the cash ran like a trout stream

knowing it wasn’t your handprintsthey were after: no gold nude

for the mantle, or a globe or Victrola.Not even money or a gold record —

“Man,” he would sit up thinking,“they just want my guitar.”

Pulchritude

You’re sexy as hell the guy on the next barstoolsaid. I wanna know, how’s that sexy? It’s hot?Cicero knew it in Claudius Pulcher, so grotesquely beautifulout from his saffron dress, from his headdress,from his Cinderella slippers and his purple ribbons,from his dereliction, from his lust.You’d dress me up like a tartor in a little devilcostume, completewith horns and pitchfork,and then say you’re hot.

I’d dress you up like a fireman.And I’ll be on fire.

Call It History

In tragedy, you die.In comedy, you marryTell me, who wrote this system?

Considering the options,I killed parts of myselfevery time I said I do,

which was never funnyparticularly when I did not anymore.

No bliss outside of marriage –the system directs out of decency,preferring the conjugalto lusting adulterous or flirting.Yes, even the flirting.

What about – you marry for comedyand divorce to be bornagain, twist of sacrament?

Call it history.

Leah M. Hughes is from Dalton, Georiga. She attended Oglethorpe University, Georgia State, and Queens University of Charlotte. She educates and writes in the metro-Atlanta area, where she enjoys copious reading, her three dachshunds, gardening, and live music.

Miss Denise’s favorite spot was the left corner chair on her front porch.Most of her life she had sat there watching the neighborhood. Often she would sit well past sundown, giving the breeze time to dry the day’s humidity caught in the creases of her brow. The August sun didn’t set until near 10pm, but the day’s heat stayed caught inside houses where every movement was a battle against the air itself as it licked at exposed skin, causing a feverish chill. It felt as though the air pushed back , stopped you from moving freely, forced youinto stuffed chairs that, while comfortable in the winter, became soggy, sticky traps in the summer. For all these reasons Miss. Denise longed to sit out on her porch tonight. Instead she stood in the doorway, staring at the faded lawn chair, imagining the cool air in her lungs.But that relief was just out of reach. Working against the moldy screen door were a legion of mosquitos. They buzzed against the door, seeking any small cut or hole that would allow them access to the old woman’s blood filled arms and legs. This was Michigan in the summer.“The Devil’s own,“ Miss Denise sighed, swatting at a bug that had gained entrance and started feasting on her arm. Its death left a small splatter of blood on the old womans delicate, thin skin.Forced by nature to seek relief, Miss Denise stood in the doorway, avoiding the bugs, greedy for the cool air. She looked out across the street, staring at what had once been the Freemans’ house. The foundation was still intact, strong and solid as ever. Like all the houses on this block it had been built well. Michigan weather tested houses and humans alike; striking against them with biting winds, freezing rains and thick snow in winter then turning it all around in summer with unrelenting temperatures and humidity so high a person could swim to the store.Some of the front porch was still there, wooden beams rising up towards a missing roof. The rest of the house was nothing more than broken glass and charred wood. The Freemans had left ten years ago, nobody had wanted their house, so it sat ready to be stripped for saleable scraps, torn up by vandals, and burned to the ground by unknown shadow figures who came and went at night.The neighborhood turned 100 this year, but it had started dying at 90. Miss Denise had been born and raised in that neighborhood, in the very house whose doorway she now looked out from. She certainly never thought she would be the only person left in the last house standing on a once lively block.“Blight!” Miss Denise huffed, “An even uglier word for cancer.”But houses don’t get cancer, so they call it something short and nasty. It spread like cancer though, leaving little behind except shelters, stray cats, and drug addicts.A breeze picked up. Closing her eyes she heard it moan through the glassless windows. Far back in her memory a child yelled ‘wait up!’ as bikes whizzed by. She smiled.“You be careful now!”Catching herself Miss Denise opened her eyes. The memory faded as she stared out at the remains of the Kibber house. Another memory shoved its way up, overwhelming Miss. Denise with the smell of ribs coming off the grill. Sam Kibber and his ribs! It was a two day process of sauce boiling, meat smoking, biscuit baking, and finally wood fire grilling. The Kibbers never sent out party invitations, they just opened their kitchen windows.The Kibbers had left eight years before. Their house sat empty, another cancerous tumor for all to see. Finally a mysterious fire had burned any hope of a new family filling its rooms.Fire took the Greens’ house, too. The Greens had arrived in the late 90’s to a block that was still very middle class. Mr. Green mowed that lawn every week, trimming every edge to symmetrical perfection. He planted flowers so early each spring that a late frost shriveled leaves and froze roots more than once. But the next weekend he’d be back with another flat, all those bright reds and yellows.Once the blight began, nobody wanted a house on this block, so they hademptied, one after another and bit by bit they were taken apart. Thieves always arrived first, pulling copper pipes from walls, carting appliances to scrap metal yards, taking doorknobs, lighting fixtures, stained glass windows; anything.The thieves were followed by squatters and drug addcts. Fights became common in what had once been a peaceful neighborhood. And Miss Denise was certain that the Greens’ house had last been used for murder. From her front porch she once heard such awful sounds.Cursing, crashing, flesh smacking against flesh; it bothered her so that she had run inside, slamming and bolting the thick wood door. Still she heard screaming, until very suddenly she heard nothing.She had called the police, telling what she saw and heard, but they never bothered to show.“Just a torn down neighborhood with a scared old lady, what they gonna do?” she asked nobody.And so it was up and down the street, memories tied to the remains of homes in a once proud neighborhood. The only keeper of those precious memories, an old woman standing alone in the doorway of the last house left standing.Sometimes in her mind she saw the Williams Christmas light display, each year it grew bigger and brighter until it went dark three years ago when the Williams took the twinkly bulbs to Georgia.Once the cancerous blight took hold, the flights of fear began. One after another they had departed, leaving only an old woman in an old house, paid off by her father long before shetook over.Anger rose in Miss. Denise’s throat, “I told you not to get another mortgage! Factories been closing for 30 years, I said. Interest rates go up, I said. That house is yours! It’s paid for, I said. But you all wouldn’t listen to some dumb old woman. Blue skies and sunshine that’s all you damn fools saw. Well I saw the clouds gathering. Saw the rain a coming, and it came and it fell, like it always does ending good times, like it always does.”Weii, maybe they all hadn’t taken out second and third mortgages, but enough had. Pensions were squandered trying to fend off foreclosures, but those bright yellow bank notices always ended up tacked on doors.And if the mortgage man didn’t get you, the tax man did. Nobody cared that when the car parts factory closed it took your dry cleaning customers with it, the city still wants revenue.“They’re just waiting on me.” Miss Denise shifted her focus back to the frenzy of mosquitoes outside her door. “They’re all just waiting on me. Bloodsuckers.”She hit out at the screen door causing a small, living cloud to burst away backwards. For a moment they took each other in, the old woman and the buzzing little cloud. The mosquitoes waited, hovering, on the other side of the rotting door. Miss. Denise backed away leaving the cool night breeze for the bugs as the oven-high heat of her living room swallowed her up.

Kelly Lett recently moved from Los Angeles to Detroit to pursue her writing career. Thanks to the internet she is able to tell stories while enjoying a much lower cost of living.

Maude Mabel was particular. Maude always kept her room spotless and her fur clean. Her clothes were all folded neatly in her dresser drawers, and her coats and dresses remained hanging in her closet with the hangers all facing in the same direction. Her closet shelves were neatly lined with boxes of crafts and other storage bins. Maude always brushes her teeth for the recommended three minutes, and makes sure to floss every time. She only uses eight squares of toilet paper in the bathroom. Never seven, never nine; Maude felt more comfortable with even numbers.

Maude went about every morning in the same way: she made her bed, put on the day’s favorite dress (unless it happened to be a Friday, and then she put on her favorite purple, polka-dotted shirt), ate a hearty breakfast of cheesy scrambled eggs and toast with strawberry jam — never letting the two mingle, gathered her school things in her old backpack with the flower patches sewn into it, and left the house for school at 8 o’clock sharp.

Her schooldays remained almost the same from day-to-day. She started the day with a simple social studies, and continued on with math- she liked math, because everything had a right answer, unlike her next class: English. After English her class took a snack break, and then had gym. Gym was followed by lunch and then recess, which was spent mostly on the swings, where she would swing no more and no less than sixty times. She then had Spanish, music, and finally, her favorite class: art.

Maude liked that art was her last class of the day, so she always had something to look forward to. Whenever her teacher gave them some free time to work on whatever they pleased, she always chose her favorite way of expressing herself: painting. All of her paintings included her three favorite things: the bright yellow sun, a tall, lush tree- always with an owl hole, and herself wearing, of course, her favorite purple polka-dotted shirt. Every time, though, she would change something about the painting. Sometimes there wouldn’t be an owl in the owl hole, or sometimes, depending on the season, the leaves would be orange and red, or not there at all. Some paintings would have more flowers than others, and she often painted herself with blue or pink ribbons in her fur.

One rainy Friday afternoon, there she was, painting her same painting with the purple polka-dotted shirt and her pretty pink ribbons, when the clumsiest boy in class, Jackson Spivey (who Maude Mabel tried to avoid as often as possible) swung his arm around and accidentally knocked over a bottle of green paint, making one large splat right on top of her artwork, landing right where she had just painted her perfect, purple, polka-dotted shirt. Jackson Spivey froze in embarrassment as Maude Mabel froze in frustration. Her stomach started filling up with thunder and lightning that was just as anxious as the storm brewing outside, just as it always does when she’s forced to stray from her routines, but then something funny happened… The rain outside started calming down, and so did her stomach…

Maude stood staring at the painting, confused. She couldn’t explain why, but she actually sort of liked the way the green splat looked on her purple shirt. Maybe it was the way the two colors looked together, or maybe it was how the splat was so simple that it added just enough crazy to actually look cool. Whatever it was, it changed Maude Mabel’s perspective and she hugged and thanked the messy boy who she had hated all year.

After this art class phenomenon, Jackson and Maude became best friends, and he showed her how to live life in a more fun, carefree way. At recess, he showed her that you don’t have to stop swinging once you reach sixty, because seventy, or even eighty, can also be fun, and you don’t even have to count at all!

At home, during dinner time, Maude saw her brother mixing his mashed potatoes with his meatloaf. At first, she was disgusted at the thought of food touching, but he seemed to enjoy it, and so she thought she would give it a try. She took her fork, mixed away, and threw a heaping mouthful of mash onto her tongue. She was delighted by how it tasted and could not believe she hadn’t discovered this sooner.After these little discoveries, Maude wondered what other little secrets to happiness were hiding behind the routines she had spent so long perfecting, and she decided to get a little crazy… Maude took all the arts and crafts boxes out of her closet and spilled its contents all over her desk, hoping that she would in time become more creative. She opened up her sock drawer and tossed around rainbow handfuls until striped socks rested with polka-dotted socks and pink socks hung around with orange socks, because who doesn’t like a little mixin’ and matchin’? She tore up all of her gel-pen lists, neglecting any and all routines she had planned for the night, the next day, and all the days after that. Maude went back to her closet and mixed everything up, no longer feeling the need for her dresses to be color coordinated. After tiring herself out from all the excitement of new experiences, Maude decided to go to sleep early, at 8 o’clock instead of 9 o’clock. She changed into mismatched pajamas, climbed into bed, and, soon, Maude Mabel was resting soundly with hangers pointing every which way.

Grace Imbesi, aspiring poet and children’s author. English major at Russell Sage College of Troy. New York.

Note: Haibun, originally a Japanese literary form, combines prose and haiku. Usually the prose suggests a story or journey, and, as with haiku, the prose should be succinct, concrete rather than abstract, leaning more toward imagery than narration. What’s key is that the haiku, which does not need to follow the old 5-7-5 syllable “rule”, works with the prose without repeating it. The haiku can serve as a juxtaposition; and, although it is often last, can appear elsewhere in the piece.

The Coconut Cake Lady

A woman twice my age approached me at the bakery while I waited for my order. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you,” she said, looking somber. “Would you buy me a piece of coconut cake?My eyebrows probably gave away my surprise at this very specific and, at eight in the morning, peculiar question. Who eats cake so early? I said, “Do they even have coconut cake today?” I peered at the display case: cheesecake,a chocolate torte, strawberry tarts, and looming high, the four-layer extravagance feathered with white flakes.“Yes, they do,” she said with enthusiasm. A card noted the price: the most expensive item. She didn’t look homeless, just shabby. Her cardigan’s Fair Isle pattern was blurred by wear and seemed heavy for June. I handed her the money. “Thank you so much.”I took my raisin toast and coffee to the patio, my Saturday morning treat, as I read the newspaper. The bakery’s coffee wasn’t as dark as I like, but there was cream and free refills, plus real butter and decent marmalade. For an hour, I could pretend to be the type who splurged on fancy coffee drinks and rich sweets, even though I ordered plainer fare.As I paged through the paper, I wondered: Did I look like an easy mark? Her cake cost more than my items combined. Consider it a good deed. Anyone desperate enough to ask for cake deserved it. You can’t get what you want unless you ask for it, right?It’s not enobling, dwelling on the cost of things. I went inside for more coffee. The cake lady sat with an empty plate and espresso cup. She said, “I would have paid for the cake with a check but they wouldn’t take it without the manager’s approval.And the manager isn’t in yet. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been at my bank 22 years.”I gave her a thin smile. Who writes a check for cake? You must think I’m really dumb.Later, I realized what bothered me: fear. Fear that I’d end up like her, alone and poor in the city, begging for a treat.

she walks with a caneamong quaking aspensearly November

***

Camera Obscura

Not a modest man, Eadweard Muybridge, he of the weird spelling, often signed his negatives Helios. Sun god. Some god. And he dubbed his mobile darkroom, horse-drawn wagon or chariot, “Helios’s flying studio.” To capture action, most famously a running horse, all hooves off the ground—he shot a series of stills.An early name for what we call photography was “sun drawing”. Monsieur Daguerre gave his name to his craft. Writing with light, with an echo of fancy and fantasy in photo. Can we believe what we see or is it a trick of the light? Or a manipulation of the image (cousin of imitate), sleight of hand? Solar print. If we can’t count on the sun—sunrise/sunset—what can we rely on?

technologyconquers the art of drawing:is handwriting next?

***

Mauna Kea

It’s May in Hawaii yet I’m wearing a knee-length down jacket, hood up, and padded gloves because it’s also 35 degrees and windy atop this inactive volcano. An elevation of nearly 14,000 feet and absence of light pollution make it one of the best accessible places on Earth for viewing the night sky. Near the equator, this view encompasses the northern and southern hemispheres. A simple pivot brings me the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper in one place. Although only a few thousand feet closer, the stars appear much nearer.

navigatingby starlighthow far can you go?

***

Paving the Road to Hades

The ancient Greeks are always with us. Developed as a painkiller, morphine, a derivative of opium, was named for Morpheus, Greek god of dreams. Heroin was intended to be a non-addictive substitute for morphine. name, from Greek heros, refers to a godlike character with great power. Unfortunately, heroin is highly addictive and more potent than morphine. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer marketed it in 1895 as an over-the-counter cough suppressant; it remained a Bayer trademark until World War I.

losing a warby missing the enemycamouflage

***

Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. She discovered the haibun form a few years ago and has published in CHO, Haibun Today, KYSO Flash, and other publications.

My world was not very extensive, back in those days. The house, the backyard, the front yard, the driveway, the sidewalk. We lived in a small bungalow on a busy street named Rice Boulevard. I loved to say the name and even today, I think it has a nice ring to it.

The brick on the house was a dark red. The front door was heavy wood with a fascinating crystal doorknob I liked to stare into. The living room was always in shadow and seemed cooler than the rest of the house. The only light from the outdoors streamed in from a narrow leaded glass panel set into the wall, beside the door.

Our front porch consisted of a rectangular thick slab of concrete, devoid of pillars or inlaid pebbles. It was smooth and satiny-feeling to my bare feet. Blistering hot in the summer, cold as ice in the winter and slick as oiled glass in the rain. On each side of the steps leading down to the front walk stood large spruce trees – the variety that was always plagued with “bag worms” encased in their tiny little gray cocoons, swaying in the breeze like dun-colored, shabby Christmas ornaments. When no one was looking, I picked them off, pried them open and watched the worms inside wiggle and try to dodge the bright light I had let in. After they ceased to be entertaining, I squashed them under my heel.

The driveway, two narrow ribbons of parallel tracks, was of special significance in my small world. Daddy came home up that driveway. When I saw his black coupe bump up over, then cross the bulging, heat-swollen strips of asphalt and cough its way up to the wooden garage in back, my heart pounded with excitement. After my afternoon nap, I parked myself astride my tricycle on the front walk, in order to be there first thing when he came home.

Between the sidewalk in front of our house and the curbing of the street was planted a four-foot parkway of grass. Leafy tallow trees stood guard along this strip, one every eight feet or so. To the right of our walk near the curb was an orange and black bus stop marker. Made of a wooden stake four inches square, it leaned crookedly in the dry dirt by the curbing, taller than I was. The word “BUS” was printed downward from the top in black letters, on the orange half.

One steamy afternoon, I had tired of squashing the worms on the hot porch and pedaled my tricycle back and forth along the sidewalk, watching and waiting for Daddy’s car. I was not allowed to go beyond the hedge bordering the far side of the driveway, nor was I permitted to go along the sidewalk beyond its intersection with the drive of the house on the other side.

That day, I looked up to see a woman and a young boy about my age, walking on the sidewalk, coming from the area beyond my permitted range. The woman was heavy-set, more than plump, and smiled at me. I smiled back and looked with interest at the boy. He grinned shyly and ducked his head. I remember the feathery length of his eyelashes, the wondrous shining of his eyes and his startlingly white teeth.

They stood by the bus stop, the boy hanging from the post by one hand, swinging himself around and around slowly, lunging out over the danger of the street in a daredevil sort of way, watching my face, his eyebrows arched upward in a teasing question. I dismounted from my tricycle and joined him, laughing aloud. When he laughed with me, dimples stamped his cheeks with a delighted mischief. His mother chuckled at our antics, her bosom bouncing as she shifted the paper package she carried in her arms.

It wasn’t long before the boy and I, with an instantaneous mutual joy, were holding hands and playing Ring-Around-The-Rosy in the afternoon sun, tumbling ourselves down on the grass at the end of each twirling time. Over and over we sang the old rhyme, over and over we threw ourselves down on the sticky grass. Our giggles were spontaneous, our rapport mystical. I couldn’t recall ever having had so much fun. I remember the slight odor emanating from his white shirt. He smelled of soap, starch and sunshine. His mother watched us, smiling her gentle approval, warning us occasionally to “be careful.”

I didn’t notice the front door of our house opening, but I remember the sound of my mother’s shriek:

“You get in the house this minute!”

I looked at the boy and his mother, bewildered. He had run to stand stiffly against her skirt, his black eyes round with fright, his face solemn. His mother’s face clouded over with something I could not understand. Her eyes narrowed into slits and she looked toward my mother, then away from me. I was filled with an inexplicable guilt as I ran as fast as I could, up the front walk and into the darkness of the living room. My mother slammed the heavy oaken door and grabbed me by the arm.

“Don’t you ever let me catch you playing with any of those filthy people again, young lady! They’re mean and dirty and you should know better!”

She jerked me around and beat my bottom with a flat hairbrush until my skin stung like I’d sat in a nest of yellow jackets and the tears streamed down my face. When her anger was satisfied, she stormed from the room, leaving me alone with my hysteria, unable to get my breath.

I remember stumbling over to the leaded glass panel beside the door. I leaned forward, trying to get a better look at the evil people outside by the bus stop. My tears and the beveled glass sections distorted the image of the outdoors, but I could make out their shapes, still waiting for the afternoon bus. I saw the boy’s round black head above his white, white shirt and his mother’s gentle brown hand resting on his shoulder, where his red suspenders crossed over. Not until that instant did I know there was such a thing as different skin color. Only at that precise, frozen moment in time did I become aware of certain persons’ “blackness.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, sniffled myself quietly into dry spasms and absorbed my mother’s ignorant fear with a four-year-old’s trusting obedience.

Nearly a lifetime later, I have often wished that young boy and his mother could know how I have grown from that prejudice, that ignorant xenophobic racism, of the “old South.” Now perhaps they do.

Jerine Pace Watson was graduated from Southern Methodist University with BA in English. Her work has been published in HowlRound, Brazzil, and Penthouse, and she has published several novels and chapbooks. As a Featured Writer, Jerine is willing to field questions on the esthetic and commercial aspects of being an author. She may be reached at jerinewatson9@gmail.com.

We used to stay up late, sitting on the campus quad and talking about friendship, the direction of America, or film. We’d sit there for hours, talking and listening until her feet felt numb from the cold.

We first met at orchestra auditions. She wore glasses she didn’t need and her hair was long and curly, something she always complained about to curly-haired friends like my floormate Fanny. I sat on my saxophone case. She asked, “Why are you auditioning for orchestra on the saxophone?” She doesn’t remember that this was the first time we met.

We met again later freshman year, and she was Fanny’s cool friend. My only friends were my roommates and some people who lived on my floor like Fanny, so Fanny bringing a girl from the outside conferred some sort of status upon them both. Well, at least to me it did.

She and Fanny would come back from orchestra rehearsals together and talk on Fanny’s bed. I’d come by the room to say hi to Fanny and there she was. I recognized her by those cool, transparent, circular glasses.

And then she was part of our floormate group. She started as a novelty. Somebody that everybody tried to lay claim to so that they had friends from another dorm. She fueled it, organically, by always showing funny videos to different people or talking about that cover she’d heard. Then I’d hear my floormate, one of the random ones, blasting it in the shower after I’d just stopped listening to it.

Soon she wasn’t just a novelty but our friend. All of us knew her, and she made us all laugh. I started listening to her music and making her jokes.

“I just assumed that everyone’s high school English teachers were Canadian because mine was,” she said.

Nothing made sense except for that feeling that she made you feel. But that didn’t make sense either. She had us watch The Talented Mr. Ripley and I thought that movie nailed it until Matt Damon killed Jude Law and then I knew I still couldn’t explain it. Magnetism? Longing? Obsession? MPDG?

I decided to name the feeling a crush. She made out with other guys at parties and hid her hickies with turtlenecks.

***

We made out. We were drunk. I grabbed her ass on the dance floor. A redhead girl grumbled next to us. The night ended with everyone in the girls’ bathroom on my floor, holding back our Other Film Friend’s hair as Other Film Friend thought she might vomit. Her floormate Chuck–she was bringing her external friends into our insular, floormate group– was there too, texting.

“I had a lot of fun,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you want me to walk you home?”

“I’m okay.”

We said we’d go on a date but we didn’t. She disappeared for a bit and I made out with someone else, and I thought she got jealous and weird. Now I know when she said, “I’m happy for you,” she’d been looking for an undamaging way out. The other girl and I ended the next weekend. I realized I couldn’t be into another girl if I was still after her even though that door had been closed.

***

Summer came. The last night of the semester we all went to a concert. Iron & Wine. Burlington. We called for him to play “Upward Over the Mountain,” but he didn’t. When Other Film Friend and I were leaving to drive back to campus for the night and she was staying in the city, she chased after the car like in the movies. But it was a quiet neighborhood, so it was different. Other Film Friend and I laughed and she laughed and we didn’t see her until the fall.

That summer I told her how I’d gotten really into Iron & Wine.

“That’s a really intense thing to get really into.”

I started talking about film as art. Philly, where she was from, was suddenly a cool city I wanted to live in after graduating.

We saw her back at school. She lived with Fanny and Other Film Friend, and I lived with Chuck. Chuck and I would walk from campus through the cemetery to their apartment, drinking coffee brandy I’d gotten older friends to buy us.

She made out with my old roommate. Other Film Friend’s semi-boyfriend from the year before. We all stopped seeing her, and she felt alone. I forgave her quickly but decided to let my old roommate fall away. He’d been my best friend, and he knew how I felt. How I didn’t know how to feel about her.

***

She went abroad for a year alone in Copenhagen. We all met up. A weekend in Barcelona to do a college-friends-in-Europe weekend. She told stories about the summer program she did in Cape Town making movies and the Italian friend that she’d met there. She played with a bouncy ball and took pictures, asking Other Film Friend if she wanted to use her camera. Other Film Friend still felt weird about her since last fall’s makeout incident, but Other Film Friend also had the same kind of feelings about her as I did, so I watched as she explained all she learned in South Africa while Other Film Friend had been working at an ice cream shop in Burlington.

We meant to go out to a club our last night in Barcelona, but Chuck had to Skype his mom because his dog died, and she and Other Film Friend disappeared for an hour or two in the bedroom to talk. I talked to Fanny who was studying biology at the Budapest program. Fanny laughed and played bad music and told me stories about times she got drunk. I did the same. Other Film Friend came out of the room, eyebrows high and eyes big. Then she followed behind, one of her subdued moods, eyes looking kind of high and cheeks blotchy. “Hi,” she exhaled.

Our group tried to go to the club but we couldn’t get in because not everyone was twenty-one. Were those the rules? Wasn’t that why college juniors went abroad? We went back to our rented apartment but missed the first subway back because she got crepes from a drunk-food stand with a tall Spanish girl. We didn’t get back until five in the morning, and I told her to wake me before she left for her eight o’clock flight.

&
nbsp; **

I was back at school in the spring. She wasn’t. I got over her. I got over the girl I was seeing while I was studying in Italy. When I got drunk, I’d say I missed either of them. The name I said depended on the night.

***

She came back. She came out. She’d been dating a Danish girl since September, since before I saw her in Barcelona. She talked about all her bad experiences with men. We talked about Hitchcock in our American Film class together.

American Film was good. It was just the two of us again for or the first time since it was just the two of us on the dance floor. But it was different. We were less distant, better, and older. And there was no grumbling redhead next to us.

I’d never been in love, but what did this feeling count for? Isn’t yearning a kind of love? Doesn’t longing count?

She got a new girlfriend after the Danish girl cheated on her. They were always together. I lost her again and watched through the library window as they studied. I shared the dinner table with her and her girlfriend, and I watched as they talked and said things without talking. She was in love. We didn’t see her, and she saw her girlfriend’s friends.

But one day the rest of us saw her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friends. We were all in her apartment, all ready to go to a concert. We were on the couch as the girlfriend’s friends whirled through. They laughed at things, cards she had kept from her mom, found when a dark-haired friend looked for clothes to “style” her for the concert. She came out, sleek and cool and vintage and sad.

The dark-haired girl opened a jar next to a picture of her with her late dog. She was in high school then and looked like she did when I first met her, except without the glasses. She was an only child, and I understood dog mourning.

“What are these?” The dark-haired girl asked.

I’d never seen them, but I knew she shouldn’t have asked.

“Her dog’s ashes,” her girlfriend said. She took a shot of tequila and went into the bathroom to adjust her backwards hat.

“Oh my God.”

“Why do you have these?”

“That’s gross.”

“And we were going to play with that Ouija board here?”

“I feel so gross now.”

“Are you coming?”

“I’ll meet you outside.”

They were gone. They didn’t come looking for her. The five of us from the hotel in Barcelona, Other Film Friend, Fanny, Chuck, she, and I sat. We all felt the need to say something to her but didn’t. Her face was blotchy and her eyebrows high but eyes tired. We’d later fantasize confrontations with the Dog Ashes Asshole, but those never went through.

But we sat, we five and her dog’s ashes. She got up and left to find her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s friends at the concert.

***

In the last weeks of school, how much did she think about the dog ashes? Did her girlfriend’s friends make fun of her for them? Was she still thinking about them as much as I was? Were there even dog ashes in there? I sneaked into their apartment to see for myself. She surprised me there. I’d opened the jar when she came out of the bathroom.

“It’s not what it looks like. I just had to know.”

The lid was in my hand.

“You take them,” she said.

“But I never knew your dog.”

“You did in spirit.”

“Have I met his ghost?”

“Don’t be dumb.”

“But I couldn’t,” I said.

“Now they’re yours.”

I imagined the ashes in my house. I’d put the pieces of her I’d collected into the jar. The keychain she gave me for my birthday and the Iron and Wine CD I bought after freshman year would crumble into the jar. Dog soot would fill the crevices until they were unrecognizable, and they too became ashes.

Neither of us did anything. We just stood there, she and I and her dog’s ashes.

Born and raised in Westborough, Massachusetts, Michael is a recent graduate of Bowdoin College, where he studied Italian and Spanish. He’s written his own travel blog, Misadventures with Michael, for over three years. Currently, he is teaching English at a high school in Japan.

Go for tea, hang (another) moment.Embrace.Throwback 1993:Then, still so much love.A bookstore, an art studio—Spots fill up fast.Inspired by traditionaJapanese tea,

Sip, and totally Zen out.It’s ridiculously adorable moments onInstagram,Facebook orTwitter.A photo of your friend.2015, the first time… 2015, The First Time.2015,Us.On social mediaCelebrating through the years.Get in on the fun, honey.

Sarah Diamond Burroway is a Kentucky writer. Her essays and poetry are included in the Women of Appalachia Project. Her plays and monologues have been produced in New York, California, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky. She is pursuing her MFA in Writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University.

In Western culture, Afro-textured hair is still stigmatized. Why? It is because those seen as “others” (blacks) have distinctive characteristics that are perceived by the white establishment as being undesirable? Once, this and other black attributes were either eradicated or dismissed as primitive and wild. Afro-hair in particular became a symbol for an inferior race.

Generally, I think Black self-esteem has steadily grown over the past decades. In the 1960s, the Afro was seen as a political statement of black consciousness. Angela Davis, who sported a famously large Afro, did much to change that negative perception of beauty, and she is still regarded as an icon of black empowerment. Today, multi-optional hairstyles (natural and processed) are gracing the streets, owing to the influence of the media, fashion and celebrities.

The influx of chemically based products on the cosmetics market has soared. So-called “beauty enhancers” straighten hair and bleach the skin, while some opt for the most extreme procedure of surgery to alter black features. The late pop singer, Michael Jackson, was a prime example of someone that underwent surgery to acquire European features.

Living in Berlin as a woman of color, as I do, it’s difficult to find a makeup tint suitable for a darker complexion. Most department stores do not carry products specifically made for darker skins. True, some cosmetic firms have brought out a range of makeup tones, but these do not suffice, due to the numerous shades of black skin. For the entrepreneur, there is a potential market out there of women who are desperate to find the right colour.

There are Afro shops, selling hair and beauty products in Berlin, but the products are usually expensive as they are imported. Why aren’t our cosmetic needs being met? This is perhaps partly due to negligence and partly to the fact that manufacturing products for minority groups in Europe would not be profitable. It is therefore “our” (blacks) responsibility to highlight black skin and features in a beautiful way by using whatever means necessary.

In Berlin, many mothers of mixed-race children are white Germans who may not be able to give their daughters tips concerning beauty and hair management. Some support can be found in black beauty magazines that aid and inform black women on cosmetic issues and give a positive all-round representation of black women.

Unfortunately, black women in Germany, as in many western countries, are confronted daily with marketing strategies which revolve around the western ideal of beauty–thin nose, slim hips, blonde hair, petite bone structure, etc. A number of black models have straightened their hair, and a few even resort to wearing blue or green contact lenses. These adopted characteristics may prove detrimental to a positive black identity.

However, all is not lost; it is wonderful to see the talented and beautiful black ballet dancer, Misty Danielle Copeland, gracing stages around the world. She was often told she had the wrong body type for ballet, but she persevered and proved the naysayers wrong with her grace and technique. Her determination to succeed in an art form traditionally reserved for white dancers makes her an influential role model for young peoples of color who wish to dance ballet, or, indeed, to achieve in any field.

I look forward to the day when black women living in predominantly white societies see advertisements depicting natural black women in a positive light, one that illuminates blackness as being wholesomely essential. Black is indeed beautiful.

Maroula Blades is an Afro-British poet/writer living in Berlin. She has published in various anthologies and magazines. Her poetry/music program has been presented on several stages in Germany. Her debut EP-album “Word Pulse” was released by Havavision Records (UK).

“This is important stuff to know. If there’s a banana at my door that somehow knocked, I’d be more interested in the banana itself. Like, for example, how big is it?”

“It’s a regular banana.”

“Yellow, green, black—is it rotten?”

“It’s just a simple, fresh banana. Imagine a banana and then that’s it.”

“I usually eat tiny bananas, so I’m imagining them.”

“That’s not the banana in the joke.”

“So there is a specific banana, then. How can I get the joke if we are imaging different things?”

“Come on, Frank, just go along with it.”

“Okay, sure, but again—how did the banana knock?”

“It just did.”

“What is the door made of?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Well, how thick is it?”

“Why does this matter?”

“Because if you’re saying a banana—a regular, handheld yellow banana—produced enough of a force to be heard, then the least I should know is the type of door I have.”

“Fine. Hardwood. About the same thickness of a two-by-four.”

“And the banana made an audible knocking noise?”

“Exactly.”

“See, I don’t understand. Did someone throw the banana?”

“No. I’ve told you three times already—it just knocked.”

“But things don’t just happen. That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t have to. It’s a joke.”

“No, no. It does or else I won’t get it and then it won’t be funny and isn’t that a joke’s point?”

“Fine. Sure. I guess.”

“So you’re going to tell me how a regular banana knock-knocked then?”

“Ya. Let’s just say it was standing up—”

“The banana?”

“Yes, the banana. It was standing up—”

“By itself?”

“Yes, by itself.”

“Who put it there?”

“No one.”

“So the banana got there by itself?”

“Sure.”

“You’re telling me the banana made it to my door by its own means?”

“Why not?”

“So, Bob, this is a motile banana.”

“What?”

“This is an evolutionary wunderkind. It’s a self-moving banana that can balance and stand erect.”

“Okay …”

“And with its mushy, moving interior, it somehow also evolved the ability to forcefully knock.”

“I guess.”

“This makes much more sense now.”

“Okay, sure, can I continue now?”

“Wait, Bob, wait. Didn’t it also answer ‘Banana’?”

“I guess …”

“Oh my god.”

“What is it, Frank?”

“This is a sentient banana.”

“Excuse me?”

“This inexplicably moving banana can also speak. That means it has some cognitive ability as it not only uses a door with all the common societal expectations of it—knocking politely, waiting until an answer is given—but it can mimic speech. It can form words, and more importantly, recognize what it is: a banana. No more. No less. A banana that walks, talks, and knocks.”

“Uhm.”

“Bob, I wouldn’t want a conversation. I would have the responsibility of calling NASA, universities, everyone and everything. Who knows? This banana may be the first alien.”

“Frank, it’s just a banana.”

“That does everything we do, if not better. A little thing can make such a loud noise. Imagine what else it could do. Do you think it can dance?”

“It’s a banana, Frank.”

“Can it dance, Bob?”

“No.”

“Yet it has mastered our social constructions, hearing my answer and developing a response.”

“Okay …”

“So, maybe it can also hear rhythm in music. I wouldn’t put it past the banana.”

“A dancing banana?”

“Exactly. It would put a new meaning to the phrase banana split.”

“Isn’t that a dessert?”

“It is, but you bring up an important point, Bob.”

“I did?”

“The most important, I’d say. I can’t believe I’m so stupid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Here I am answering the door when it could …”

“It could what?”

“Want revenge.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean if it is really as smart as you seem to suggest …”

“I didn’t suggest anything, Frank. You have this whole time.”

“No, no, you told the joke. I’m just extrapolating.”

“Fine. Sure. Go ahead.”

“And if it is as smart as you say, with its penchant for abstract thoughts, social norms, and speaking patterns, it might realize what we have been doing to all the other bananas on Earth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Bob, we eat them whole. We eat the banana’s people. We put them on our damn ice cream.”

“Ya, but—”

“But nothing. This banana might strike against us and I might be its first target.”

“No. It’s just knocking.”

“How do I know?”

“Because it’s knocking on your door.”

“But robbers can knock too before they plan to jump me in my own home.”

“It’s a banana. Not a robber.”

“And yet, it’s so much more than any banana before.”

“So what then?”

“Well, I’m at my door, right?”

“Ya.”

“And the banana has already knocked, right?”

“Ya.”

“And I’ve answered?”

“Get to the point already, Frank.”

“Well I’d be incredibly cautious. I’d look through the eyehole and seeing nothing—because it is a regular, small banana at the base of my door—I’d be immediately suspicious. Scared even.”

“So what would you do?”

“I’d have to play it smart. I’d cough and puff my chest and before I opened the door—who knows if I would anyways—I would say, ‘Banana who?’”

“And the banana?”

“I’m not sure. If it’s harmless, it may repeat its name because that answers the question.”

“I see. And if it’s not?”

“If redemption is in its blood, or glucose, or whatever, then it may employ the same tactic. ‘Banana,’ it’ll say in a cold, hard manner. The banana may be a master of subterfuge after all.”

“And if it said that then?”

“I’d keep sharp, keep the banana on edge. Show them the human spirit with a, ‘Banana who?’”

“Smart, Frank.”

“I think so too, Bob.”

“So, what then?”

“It’s the banana’s move. Either it can peel away, or keep going.”

“I see.”

“Exactly. Who knows—it could very well knock again and we’d be back at the beginning.”

“So, Frank, you’re saying it’s the banana’s show and we’re just monkeys in the middle.”

“Yeah, Bob.”

“Well.”

“Well is right. Good we got that out of the way.”

“Ya.”

“So what was the joke anyway?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Oh.”

“That’s alright. It’s over now.”

“I’ll say.”

“Well after it all, I’m glad at least it wasn’t an orange. Imagine that.”

Kacper Niburski is a twenty something year old pretending he’s thirty who writes like he’s fifty about things that happened when he was ten. He’s been published in Stoneboat Poetry, Ars Medica, and others.

Her mom drops her off at Lee’s Airpark, just off Route 2, where she’d seen planes take off and land almost every day, but never dreamed of seeing up close. It was bigger and more intimidating than expected.

Her mom walks with her across the tarmact. It’s a sunny day, perfect and blue, like her eyes, He says. He’s leaning up against the white plane, almost as tall as it, that short dark hair blowing in the wind, aviators on, and no one could be as cool, as sexy. He waves to Mom and Mandy holds back her smile until it hurts. He hugs her, but does not kiss her.

The takeoff is the hardest to stand. She’d flown before, but you feel it more in light aircraft. She’s scared, almost pees herself, but once they’re in the air, He puts his hand on her knee and she calms down. He soars, swoops like she never knew a plane could move so quick. Beats model rockets in Dad’s backyard. Look at that sky. Look at this man next to me who loves Mom better than anything. Will he say he loves me too? It’s so bright. I’m so high.

***

Euphoric, after days of waiting for Him to come back from his most recent flight, she watches the kite glide through the humid August breeze and wants to go up in the air again. Only next time she wants to be in control.

He walks through the yard, finally back and she wishes she was wearing something sexier than too-big jeans and His worn out Katastrophe t-shirt she took from the laundry when Mom wasn’t watching. What if he gets upset she stole it? Oh, I hope he says I look good in it. He doesn’t say anything though.

Instead, without words, He reaches his arms around her from behind and puts His hands on hers in order to show her how to do it right. The kite twists involuntarily, free but controlled. She likes it this way, him holding her close and showing her the way through the wind.

In that calm time as the sun sets orange, almost vermillion over the River Lethe, Mandy, Mom and Him eat dinner on the back porch as he tells stories of his journeys. He once flew to Venezuela just for the hell of it and stayed there for some time, living out of a rental van and learning to cook Tequenos and serenading pretty girls (an eyebrow raise at Mom). Maybe he’ll fly me and Mom there sometime, or the Caribbean or Europe or why not Canada or California? She was told to help put away dishes and when Mom sees how entranced Mandy is, she lets it go. They get along and that’s a blessing. He has a politician’s way of looking at no one and everyone as he tells a story about almost crashing his first time in the air and having to do his first landing by himself because the man teaching him had a stroke.

He could teach me guitar, too, Mandy thinks. He and Me and Mom and canget out of this. She makes a request, Katastrophe, please and he chuckles a bit. He plays the opening riff of “Trazodone” and sings the chorus as Mandy tries hard not to smile. Once he gets to the end he doesn’t really sing it, but whispers in a way: I like it, I’m not gonna leave. I like it, I’m not gonna leave…

***

She’s adult and normal and bored now like everybody else, off duty and going back up in the air soon. She’s in the grocery store, trying to decide which bag of chips to buy, a thousand flavors and brands in front of her. What was once so simple an affair now seems an overwhelming duty.

Across from the snack aisle, she spots Him placing ground beef in his cart. His dark hair now a salt and pepper white, His high and taut face, now sagging a bit, the crows feet more noticeable from so much glinting in the sun, but still as handsome as the day He took her up in the plane. She positions herself next to him, too scared because what if it isn’t him?

He makes eye contact and smiles. She smiles back, a middle school girl again.

“They really charge you an arm and a leg nowadays, huh?”

As if it’s her first time being flirted with, she’s not sure what to say and instead shrugs.

“Quiet one.” He looks at her uniform. “Naval Academy?”

She nods.

“I’m a pilot myself, actually,” he says, like it’s a question and even though she knows He’s still the cocky man He used to be, comfortable with His cool, but unimportant station in life. She still loves that sly humility. “Small cargo and personal passengers mostly. Amateur stuff, really. It’s not the same as The Blue Angels, but I have a good time. Hey, you look familiar.”

That’s when he’s greeted by a woman ten years younger than Him and prettier than Leah, now going by her middle name instead of that childish first name. With the woman is a child, a girl of maybe seven.

She does not remember her response, but she gets out of the conversation and leaves Him to hurt someone else. How dare you leave mom and me. How dare you not remember me. You flew away and never came back. It takes time to admit it, but more than anger, she’s flattered and glad He saw her make it in the air.

Up there it’s just blue. Up there, you’re a god. The takeoff used to be the hardest part, but now it’s just the landing she struggles with. A few more months and she’ll have it down perfect. If only they’d let her go where she wanted. If only they’d let her fly until she’s out of oxygen. She once thought I could die up here, His hands around hers, guiding the way. High. Bright. High.

James Prenatt has published in Crab Fat Magazine, Cactus Heart Magazine, and 34th Parallel. He lives in Baltimore with his dog, his thing, and a little human. He graduated from Towson University with a degree in English and an OK GPA.

I walk up the stairs and take a quick left to get to the time clock. I punch in my employee numbers two-five-eight-two-nine-eight just like I do after I clock out of every other shift. I walk back down the stairs to the sales floor. I walk out the automatic door faster than it can open, helping it along with the tip of my shoe. The cold air hits my face as I walk quickly to my car. I get a hold of the icy metal handle to the driver’s side door. My breathing is heavier now that I’m sitting still in my unstarted Nissan Rogue. I push the key in the ignition and hear the engine roar after sitting in the cold all day. I sit and press my toes lightly on the gas for a quick second at a time, in hopes it will warm up faster. I begin to get impatient and put the car into reverse to leave the parking lot.

***

Robert Frederick Page, Jr, was born on June 26th, 1923. He was the middle son of Robert and Julia Page. He grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where he attended parochial school. Leter, his family moved to Norwell, where he played baseball for the varsity team, achieving a record RBI. After graduation, he enlisted in the army and was assigned to the 416 Night Fighter Squadron. He was involved in multiple combat zones as an Air Operations Specialist. In 1945, he was discharged and soon became a sales representative for the National Lead Company, where stayed for 38 years. Then he worked for the Gillette Corporation, retiring 1985 at age sixty-two.

But that really doesn’t tell you who he is.

***

I drive the same roads home from work every day. Some days I stop on the way home at my grandparents, which is just a couple miles from home. I have watched the red stop signs in their neighborhood fade with time. I see the same sidewalks that lead right to the pathway to their front door. I walk up that path and open the door to the warm draft coming from their home. It’s always warm in there.

***

It was crowded on the dance floor, and young Marjorie stared at almost every gentleman in the vicinity, but didn’t see anyone special. Her friends had spent an hour bribing and convincing their younger friend to come. It wasn’t going great.

Robert walked into the room, flashed his smile, and headed toward Marjorie.

She saw him coming. He was certainly handsome.

He tried a joke. “I would take you home tonight, but my wife and kids are sleeping,” he said.

She wasn’t amused. Robert saw his mistake, took back what he’d said, and asked her to dance. She accepted the dance and fell for his smile. She liked his smile.

***

I always say hi to Grammy first. She is always the one to greet me at the door. The hardwood floors are bare; rugs get caught in Pa’s walker. I round the corner into the sunroom to see Pa sitting in his chair, watching “Wheel of Fortune,” an everyday routine. As soon as he notices me, he smiles and says, “Who are you?” He still has a beautiful smile.

I reply, “Who am I? Who are you? And since when do you live here?”

It was our little joke.

***

I take the first left onto Route 9, the same road I have traveled all my short life. The radio is playing an overplayed Justin Bieber song. I press the off button to the power of the radio, but it’s too silent for me. I turn it back on but adjust the volume to a softer notch. Before noticing what song is playing, it hits me. I am driving the same roads at the same time as always. This time was different though. My destination is the same place as usual, but for a different reason. I drive for 20 minutes, numb. My heart starts to race. Five minutes before I arrive, tears start forming in my eyes. I rub them out of the sockets of my eyes and hope my face hasn’t turned beet red from the tears. I can’t look like I’ve been crying.

I pull into the driveway of my grandparent’s home and put my car into park. I open the door to my now warmed car, step out, and shut it hard behind me. I approach the door to the house and take a deep breath. The cold isn’t bothering me. The only thing on my mind is what words will be the last words my grandfather hears come out of my mouth. I open the door to the house, walk down the hall towards the hospital bed that seems so out of place in the living room, and sit next to my grandfather to say hello and see his smile one last time.

Catherine Tersoni of Massachusetts studies English with a creative writing focus at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire.

Aiming his camera carefully, a little boy photographed the world’s last tiger.At the flash and click of the device, the tiger stopped on the track he had worn in the dirt beside the finger-smeared glass of his enclosure and regarded the boy with mournful green eyes. “What do you see when you look at me?” the tiger asked.“A tiger,” replied the boy.“What makes me a tiger?”The boy blinked at that, the question seemingly obvious. “Your orange and black stripes, of course.”The tiger studied his coat’s reflection in the enclosure glass: long, branching lines of black cut through with burnished gold, like a forest at day’s end–the sunset of an entire species marked upon his flanks.Stripes for camouflage, stripes to warn both prey and competitor alike to give his ferocity wide berth; though there was little need for either anymore: the zoo had long rendered his patterns redundant, a sign of remembered majesty. The cat asked, “Is that the only thing that makes me a tiger, what I look like?”“Well, I heard you growl before, and I bet you could purr if you tried,” the boy replied.“I was raised by humans. I have never spoken to another tiger in my life. I am not sure how one is to act, what one is to say. Tell me, can I still be a tiger if I’ve lost my language and my culture?”“I don’t know,” the boy murmured. He sat down on the ledge at the foot of the enclosure window and put his hand against the glass. After a while, the tiger sat down opposite, and, lifting his great golden foot, laid his pads against the boy’s palm, just the pane of glass between them. A woman passing by the tiger alcove with a child in a stroller clicked a photo of them and moved on.The boy studied the tiger’s foot, where just the white tips of the claws were visible. “How about hunting?” he suggested. “I mean, I know other species hunt, but tigers are the biggest cats in the world and everyone knows cats make the best hunters.”The tiger withdrew his paw and studied it, flexing the scythe-like claws. “My food comes to me dead. I have never had to kill.”An awkward silence fell between them. The tiger listened to the background hum of human visitors admiring the zoo’s rare and elusive animals; heard them clamouring for ice cream, for toilets, for the animals to come out of their vegetation and sleeping quarters for photos.They hardly looked before clicking and moving on. The tiger studied the black camera slung around the boy’s neck. He wondered if the images were something the humans admired over and over or if the visitors merely hoarded them in preparation for a day when pictures were all that remained of his kind. A bucket banged and otters twittered, snapping the tiger out of his reverie. Their feeding time always drew a crowd: people laughing, children squealing, the snap, click and boop of images being preserved.In the distance, a lion roared.“It seems I am not much of a tiger, for all that I look like one,” he said.“You are! You are!” the boy protested. His face creased with concentration as he tried to think of some other feature that would confirm the animal before him a tiger. “I know! You can make baby tigers! That definitely makes you a tiger!”“Not alone I can’t, and not as a male.”That brought the boy up short. “What are you then, if you look like a tiger, but don’t know anything about being one? If you can’t speak tiger or hunt like a tiger or even make other tigers?” The tiger indicated the camera. “I am what you all wanted–a picture of a tiger.”

Shauna O’Meara is an artist, writer and veterinarian based in Australia. She was a winner of the 2014 Writers of the Future contest and her short stories have appeared in several Australian anthologies and magazines. Her work and links to her art portfolio can be found at:

leaves flutteracross the groundlike the butterfliesthat used to flaptheir wings againstyour stomachtwirling and whirlingat the sight of herlips her hipsher eyesbutterflies wreak havocat the soundof her voicemention of her namebutterflies sitheavy and waitingeager to flapand flutterand churnyour stomachbutterflies reservedonly for her

Melissa Mason is an English major with a focus in Creative Writing and an Art minor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She hopes to be anovelist one day, though she also enjoys writing short stories and poetry.

You were in the bread aisle that morning stocking loaves of Wonderbread. I was startled that your hair was pink. I don’t know why that startled me, especially since mine was blue, but it did. Your hair was pink and you were stocking bread. I needed that bread, but you had the bread. To get it, I needed to talk to you, look at you, and maybe even touch your long fingers that could play piano (I was sure they could).I stood there far longer than I’d like to admit, my hands twitching and my blood buzzing, hot, through all of my veins. The decision felt like one of life or death, honestly, like all new decisions on crazy days. If I didn’t get my bread, I couldn’t make tuna, tomato, and bacon for lunch or dinner. If I didn’t make lunch or dinner, I’d have to order it somewhere. Ordering it meant speaking to someone over the phone. A phone call would mean a fast, stuttering death, I was convinced.I had to go get the bread, so I did what any sane person would do—approached you. You looked at me and smiled your sunshine, daffodil smile, and I began to burn. You asked if you could help me in your windy blue voice and I apologized, turned around, and left.I put my basket down somewhere and went to another store.I saw you again after lunch while I was at the library. My mind was all colors and buzzing static like a broken TV. I was touching every single fiction book individually, because one might be something other than a book—maybe something new, and then there you were again, next to me. Your pink hair smelled clean and you had your piano fingers pulling a book that I had touched and wasn’t previously struck by. But now you touched it, and when you touched it, my ears had big ringing alarms in them. I needed to open it now, but you were holding it, and I couldn’t do it. I fumbled and picked up a book that was smooth, had no interesting binding, and was nothing but a decoy that I used to distract myself from you.It would have been easy to get the book had you not had pink hair or green eyes or a flabbergastingly calm, gentle air about you.The more I thought about you and your kind vibes and soft skin, the more skeptical I became. Who were you? Why were you following me? Were you following me? Why are you nice to sit next to? Why did you have to be at the R’s while I was at the R’s? WHY DID YOU HAVE MY BREAD?! I was so lost in my own racing, muddy head that I didn’t realize I was staring at you. You stared back. I messed up. Oh my god, you hate me. I panicked. I couldn’t breathe or hear. Everything was too bright suddenly.“Hi,” I said.“…Hi?” you said back in your voice—still windy, but now green instead. You were green and I was orange. We clashed, I knew we would.“Can I see that book?” You handed it to me and I took it, my hands shaking like leaves blown by your presence. I held the book. It was warm, and I shook and struggled to open it. Caressing the cover, I flipped through the pages, one by one. You were looking at me, gently, but still you were looking. I squeezed it and thrust it back at you, apologized, and—once again—ran away.I got outside and ran to my car and cried. I had disturbed your day—I was sure of it. My brain ran like a lawnmower: “You hate me hate me hate me HATE me hate me hate me” and I had upset you, scared you, worried you. You: warm, sunny, spring day you. I didn’t even know your name, but I hurt you, I knew it. My veins were full of angry stinging bees, my tears were boiled water and my head screamed like broken brakes. I took a breath, deep and staggering, and leaned my head back. Suddenly—tap tap tap. I jerked up, tightened like a spring, and turned to my window. You again.“You forgot this.”You held up the book. You smiled kindly, gently, and your eyes were like a cup of tea after the rain. I rolled down my window and wiped my face with my sleeve.“Thank you.” I took the book from your piano fingers.“I like your hair,” you said. I bit my lip and looked down, hiding a stupid smile.“I like yours too.” It was quiet for a second and you looked directly into my eyes.“I hope you feel better. That’s a good book,” you said, and you turned and started walking away.Maybe because you were a new day full of sun and music, or maybe because I was delirious from crying, I asked, “Do you want it back when I’m done?” You smiled a big Wonderbread smile, but tried to hide it and nodded. I gave you my name and you gave me yours. We parted, and I ran your name over and over in my head like it’s the only word I knew.

Grace Cook is a student at Worcester State University studying Elementary Education and Theater. She hopes to become a reading specialist to help better kids’ understanding of reading.

Reawakened, a great read for lovers of mythology, love triangles, Egyptian princes and adventure, is the first novel in the Reawakened series by Colleen Houck. The protagonist, Lily Young, is a seventeen-year-old living in New York City. During spring break she goes to her favorite museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and comes across the mummy exhibit. What she doesn’t expect is for the Egyptian prince Amon to awaken, handsome and shirtless, and inform her that he needs to borrow her life force until he can find his brothers. Lily, being raised in the present day, where shirtless men wearing skirts are not the norm, thinks he is crazy and has a plan to feed him and then return him to whatever mental institution she believes he has escaped from. Through a magical twist, she finds herself in Egypton a quest to find his brothers, the personification of the moon and the god of the stars, so that they can defeat the evil shape-shifting god Seth and save humankind before time runs out. Quite a yarn.

I’ve found Colleen Houck is a captivating writer whose books I cannot put the book down, and she does not disappoint with Reawakened. She starts the book wonderfully, describing the basic genealogy of ancient Egyptian mythology which, unbeknownst to the reader, is the foundation of the whole story. Indeed, the tale of Amon and Lily’s demonstrates the author’s extensive knowledge of Egypt and Egyptian mythology, and she weaves together these myths into a fascinating narrative.

Houck uses inner dialogue and diction to add depth to the protagonist Lily, and to bring out the personalities of other supporting characters in this novel. For example, she uses interesting dialogue in the line “I flashed my membership card,” as an exciting way to show the reader that Lily loves museums and visits this one often, instead of saying that Lily goes to the museum every Monday and Wednesday and stays until closing. Houck has also mastered the art of diction. This novel features a lot of adventure, and Houck captures it all with her colorful words. This book made me talk at the pages like I would a movie, pleading for Lily to not touch that rock, or to watch out for booby traps; for her to listen Amon, when he tells her to wait inside. She allows the reader to not just read words on a page but to live them out through the characters.

One of my favorite quotes from Lily is in the beginning of the novel when she says, “Though in my heart I longed for some chaos and adventure, the truth was that I very much depended on order to function.” This is a great quote, because it is ironic and foreshadows the impending chaos and journey she will soon partake on. If she thinks she needs order to function now, then she will so be proven wrong when she is thrown into a heart-stopping adventure. Lily develops into a stronger character able to handle thenew challenges that life throws at her.

If I have any criticism of the book, it is that the first part of the story escalates too quickly. Lily meets a strange man in the museum and thinks he is mentally ill, but then three chapters later she wants to kiss him. This introduction of romance into this novel seems rushed and awkward. From that point on, however, as the story begins to really unfold, both the romance and plot is set at the perfect pace. If you enjoyed the novels in her Tiger’s Curse series, then it may take a while to stop picturing her other heartthrobs, Ren and Kishan, in place of Amon and his brothers, but believe me, Amon’s features and mannerisms are definitely swoon-worthy. It’s a great read. Be careful when you read it, because the second book is not out yet and you may very well fall off of the cliff you’ll be hanging from.

Editor’s note: The second novel in this series, Recreated, will be published this summer.

Kelcy Williams of Maryland studies Mechanical Engineering and Professional Writing at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts, to be a Mechanical Engineering major, soon to have a Journalism minor. She loves books and Korean barbecue.